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

Plantinga readily acknowledged the influence of TEI on his work, but in light of the broad adoption of TEI, his reasons for not adopting it directly command attention twenty years on. “The Text Encoding Initiative,” he concluded, “is semantically rich for literary analysis but not easy to learn or tuned for theological study. It doesn’t offer special handling of scripture references or Strong’s-like reference systems . . . [It] is very large and the overhead required to learn and process the language is high.” It was to supply these perceived deficiencies that ThML was developed and deployed for the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) hosted at Calvin College. Although Plantinga has never made any deliberate effort to missionize ThML as a standard beyond the CCEL, its example prompted adoption by a number of other projects, such as the OpenBible software project for Unix, the Go Bible mobile app, and most notably the SWORD project of the Crosswire Bible Society.

These applications reaped benefits from several elements in the ThML schema that facilitated work on Bibles and related texts. Most obvious is the element <verse>, providing a ready and unambiguous encoding for this common unit, which is almost unaccountably absent from TEI. Plantinga also offered the element <argument> for chapter or section subheads or summaries of topics of discussion, as are frequently found in Bibles (and other early modern books) to summarize the contents of chapters. The easy differentiation of these from other kinds of headings and titles made their inclusion or suppression in various displays easy to implement. The elements <scripRef>, and <scripture> helped to distinguish references and allusions to scripture from direct scripture quotations, as well as neatly separating both from all other forms of intertextuality, in order to build more readily automated indices of the use of scriptural texts in Patristic writings and elsewhere. Likewise, <scripCom> conveniently designated passages that functioned as commentaries on scripture, with type attributes allowing fine grains of distinction in identifying commentary as diverse as prose treatises and sections of canonical hymns.

Representation of hymns was a major focus of Plantinga’s design. Not only did they receive their own <hymn> element, but this was permitted to take child elements designating <meter>, <author>, <tune>, <composer>, an <incipit> (providing opening measures transposed to the key of C), and <music> (embedding recordings or sheet music). All of these features are now richly deployed in a sister-project to the CCEL—hymnary.org—which has received sponsorship from the Hymn Society of the United States and Canada as well as funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Perhaps ThML’s most distinctive feature is the element <sync>, which Plantinga designed for “dates, keywords, or Strong’s numbers [that] aren’t really links to other documents . . . Therefore XLL links, element IDs, etc., don’t capture the semantics of such information.”2

Although now largely restricted in use to the CCEL and hymnary.org, ThML has influenced many subsequent projects and earned indirect notice from the academic community through the features it has made possible at those websites (in large part by making them easy to implement by student and community volunteers who have encoded hundreds of books). The shortness and simplicity of the ThML schema is especially notable in reading appraisals like that of Brian Kooy, who, reviewing the CCEL for Reference Reviews, described it as “a well-executed and technically rich site with . . . features unmatched by any other online digital collection of its kind.” He paid particular attention to the search options “for definitions [and] for scripture passages,” which were directly enabled by the specific design features of ThML mentioned above.3

XSEM and OSIS

One year after Plantinga began development of ThML, Dennis Drescher approached SIL International—a Christian organization that promotes linguistic research in support of translation and mission efforts—with

2 XLL links are now more commonly known as XLinks—an XML-based standard for the formatting of links to Web content.

3 Brian K. Kooy, “Christian Classics Ethereal Library,” Reference Reviews 25.7 (2011): 12.