46 Theological librarianship • Vol. 12, No. 1 april 2019

above the level of a paragraph) for Bible verses. Given that encoding for theological projects often aims at the most intensive levels of interoperability in order to facilitate sophisticated cross-indexing, parallel alignment, and commentary attachment, the unpredictability of any given text’s encoding of something as basic as a verse unit is a severe impediment to exchange of research data.

Of course, it is not expected by TEI that any project will use the full range of elements, and customization by narrower selection of element modules is actively encouraged. Two difficulties commonly arise from this. One is that customization of TEI is even more daunting from a technical standpoint than using it. Because the customizations do not come pre-packaged for consumer use but instead arise ad hoc from the user base, projects that do not have in-house tech specialists and cannot afford to contract any often attempt to shoehorn their work into an ill-fitting but ready-made customization, as evidenced by the widespread use of TEI Lite, which was intended originally as a technical demonstration and not meant to be used for real-world projects at all. This creates an interoperability divide between well-resourced and/or tech-savvy projects and those which are not. Even in ideal cases, however, customization at high levels of technical proficiency often serves only to solidify incompatibilities when projects select different elements for similar or even identical purposes when building their customizations. Selecting narrower ranges of elements for particular projects may increase consistency, and therefore interoperability, within those projects, but it does little to achieve those goals across projects. Neither should the present system of customization be overestimated in its effectiveness on this point at even the project level. UCLA’s introductory tutorial for digital humanities warns its reader that “even the same individual working on different days can use tags differently. The range of interpretation is difficult to restrict, and individual acts of tagging are rarely consistent.”18 It thus seems difficult to disagree with Schmidt, noting that the foundational goal of TEI was a ready data exchange and maximized interoperability that no one has achieved, owing to the subjectivity inherent in TEI. This, of course, is only the double-edge of the sword XML designers originally forged—ambiguity being the inescapable result of its core goals of “flexibility, extensibility, [and] modularity.”19

Jerome McDonough has given as much thought as anyone to finding a way out of this bind. “One possible response . . .” he has suggested, “would be to say that perhaps our community cares less about interoperability than we thought . . . and [that] the adoption of metadata standards that impeded interoperability is merely a reflection of that underlying reality, and not a major problem to resolve.”20 The fact that significant projects like CCEL and SWORD continue to use what are now highly idiosyncratic encodings would seem to offer some support for this conclusion. At the same time, however, they also lend support to McDonough’s following suggestion—that libraries can favor interoperability by more severely restricting the range of encoding options and thus “decreasing the possibility for local variation in encoding.”21 This was, in fact, an implicit design goal of both ThML and OSIS as against TEI, and necessarily contributed to their isolation as TEI’s influence grew—an outcome McDonough recognized when he speculated that “removing local capacity for variation will also tend to reduce the number of institutions who are willing to use such a markup language.”22 McDonough ultimately rejected this approach as not flexible enough to engage successfully with publishers and other communities and instead favored a shift in priorities that would see crosswalk development elevated to the same level of respect and resource-commitment presently enjoyed by the development of independent markups.23 This, too, can be found among theological markup communities today, with projects frequently developing tools

18 UCLA Center for Digital Humanities, “Text Encoding: Mark-up and TEI,” Intro to Digital Humanities: Concepts, Meth-ods, and Tutorials for Students and Instructors,” September 2013, http://dh101.humanities.ucla.edu/?page_id=60.

19 Jerome McDonough, “XML, Interoperability and the Social Construction of Markup Languages: The Library Ex-ample,” digital humanities quarterly 3.3 (2009), http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000064/000064.html

20 McDonough, “XML,” paragraph 30.

21 McDonough, “XML,” paragraphs 32-33.

22 McDonough, “XML,” paragraph 33.

23 McDonough, “XML,” paragraph 34.