Peer-Reviewed Articles • Twenty Years 45

it has not been able to fully supersede either ThML or OSIS, which continue to find user communities despite their age, lack of active support, and limited interoperability across TEI-dominated fields of scholarship.

Such supersession might have been expected for reasons beyond the simple desire for interoperability in texts and tools. For one thing, many of the key institutions and individuals that contributed to theology-specific projects were also engaged with TEI. The Society of Biblical Literature, for example, was a participant in the TEI Consortium throughout the years it participated in the Bible Technologies Group, and Patrick Durusau, who worked for the SBL on OSIS, also served on the TEI Character Set Working Group.15 As one would expect, these close connections facilitated technology transfer, and TEI was enriched by ideas emanating from other projects. The P5 release, for instance, incorporated the “Trojan milestone” method for encoding overlap in non-hierarchical structures, citing the work of Steven DeRose.16 DeRose served as the chair of the Bible Technologies Group and developed the Trojan milestone method as part of the OSIS development team.

Despite this cross-fertilization and its general growth and refinement over the past twenty years, however, TEI has not overcome the two major critiques offered by Plantinga back in 1998—it is difficult to learn and apply consistently, and it is not tuned for theological work. The following sections address each of these critiques from a discipline-specific perspective in light of more recent literature on TEI, before the conclusion offers notes toward possible resolutions and the enrichment thereby of both TEI as a standard and theological digital humanities as a community.

Difficulty and Interoperability

The first of the two reasons Plantinga gave back in 1998 for not embracing TEI for his digital theological library was that it was “not easy to learn” and that this would inhibit the willingness and ability of others to contribute to the project. Twenty years on, TEI has not become appreciably easier. That the language itself retains a steep learning curve is, of course, to be expected in light of the inherent complexity of the vast range of tasks it seeks to accomplish, but it is disquieting that more tools have not appeared to ease the end-user into the process. Hence, ease-of-use and interoperability quickly begin to fuse into a multifaceted yet singular concern, because low ease-of-use is partly the result of a paucity of software tools for facilitating the markup process, and partly the result of the proliferation and consequent ambiguity of the element set, which in turn inhibits software development.

There are, at present, 567 TEI elements—twenty-three more than there were in 2012, when Desmond Schmidt observed the perverse effects that this daunting range has on the Initiative’s raison d’être. Beyond simply intimidating the non-specialist and thus excluding potentially valuable contributors to DH projects (just as Plantinga had worried), the breadth of the element set works to ensure ambiguity in the selection of elements for even basic editorial tasks.17 An almost absurd example familiar to biblical scholars is that of selecting an element to encode verses in standard chapter/verse reference systems. The P5 guidelines suggest the use of the <ab> element (“anonymous block”—typically used as a catch-all for non-paragraph structures with paragraph-like functions) for encoding “canonical verse divisions of Biblical text,” but counsel in the very next paragraph that the <seg> element (“segment”—typically used for otherwise unspecified structures below the level of a sentence) may be preferred for the same purpose in order to avoid conflicts with <p> (“paragraph”) structures. Meanwhile, an example of reference system encoding elsewhere on the same page demonstrates the use of the <div> element (“division”—typically used as a generic descriptor for structures

15 Society of Biblical Literature, “Biblical Scholars, Standards and the SBL,” SBL Forum, 2.6 (2004), https://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?ArticleId=45.

16 Steven DeRose, “Markup Overlap: A Review and a Horse,” Proceedings of Extreme Markup Languages 2004, http://xml.coverpages.org/DeRoseEML2004.pdf.

17 Desmond Schmidt, “The Role of Markup in the Digital Humanities,” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozial-forschung 37 (2012): 125, 128.