Peer-Reviewed Articles • Twenty Years 41

“markup languages” for setting biblical text in newly digitized publishing processes, with each publisher generally employing its own proprietary standard.

By the turn of the century, however, the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Extensible Markup Language (XML) began rapidly to overtake such idiosyncratic systems. XML was simultaneously human- and machine-readable, readily compatible with the Web, and easily customized for a wide variety of uses. Its overarching “syntax” for how documents are to be described in machine processing is more a standard for the creation of markup languages than a markup language in itself. Various projects realize their own languages through XML by adding to its basic set of “tags” marking “elements” and “attributes” in the text, in order to be able to describe the features they deem important. Basic tags included in all XML-based languages mark such “elements” as titles, paragraphs, quotations, and points of emphasis. Implementations of XML in the form of specific markup languages customize the available “tags” to enable more sophisticated and precise descriptions of the physical features of a document, the literary devices found in the text, variants among manuscripts in particular locations, or whatever may be of interest within a particular discipline or a specific project.

Combined with this flexibility, the openness of XML’s technical standards promised not only a way out of the publishers’ Babel, but also an extension of the benefits of computer-aided publishing to smaller enterprises, such as missionary groups printing Bibles in indigenous languages or digital libraries using the Internet to disseminate materials for theological study.

T h ML

The release notes for Harry Plantinga’s 2001 Theological Markup Language (ThML) identified several objec-tives of a markup language for theological study, stating that it should support:

1) special processing for scripture references

2) synchronization and alignment of texts in multiple versions (variants, translations, etc.)

3) representation of hymns and mixed media

4) cross-referencing of Strong’s numbers, diverse indices, commentaries, etc.

5) library-wide searching of texts by multiple facets (subject, scripture reference, etc.)

6) user annotation of texts without alteration to the original file

7) direct incorporation of bibliographic metadata

8) royalty-free use and redistribution of the markup language itself

9) web-based access without need of software beyond the web browser

“Existing markup languages,” Plantinga concluded, “do not meet all of these needs.” He dismissed word processor formats and HTML as lacking adequate representation for semantic information and rejected commercial formats of the time (such as STEP and the Logos Library System) as prohibitively expensive and not fully Internet ready. While these judgments would likely be shared by any digital humanist today, what stands out from Plantinga’s assessment of the state of the art at the beginning of the 21 st century is his critique of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).

TEI describes both a technical standard and a scholarly community of practice, inaugurated in 1987 with the aim of providing a common framework for text encoding across humanities disciplines. In 2002, the “P4” release of the TEI Guidelines embraced XML as the underlying architecture for TEI encoding, establishing an array of hundreds of XML elements to provide a thorough toolkit for all manner of digital humanities (DH) projects while ensuring the greatest possible interoperability among resulting data and documents. Its broad success in this endeavor is shown by the fact that today it is the de facto standard within humanities, used for everything from the British National Corpus and the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre to the Perseus Project and Epidoc.