Written by Helen Wu
I was waiting for the elevator on the 7th floor of Harbour Centre at SFU after a four-hour, info-packed session on encoding entities using TEI-XML when UBC English professor Mary Chapman approached me with a refreshed and excited energy. Her ongoing research project on the Eaton family had been featured previously by Digital Scholarship in the Arts (DiSA).
“It’s very helpful to be part of a group,” Chapman told me. “Encoding with TEI at home, I sometimes found it difficult to know what went wrong when an error came up. Here you have experts and colleagues by your side to help figure things out.”
The 2025 TEI Summer Sessions is a three-part series co-hosted by DiSA, SFU’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DHIL), the Adaptive TEI Network, and the UBC Library Research Commons, running from June to August. The second session featured presentations on the rich variety of entity encoding available to TEI users, hands-on activities, and a case study of The Lyon in Mourning, a major TEI project led by SFU Scottish Studies Professor Leith Davis and the DHIL, which involves analyzing and encoding complex people, places, and objects in ambiguous and sometimes intentionally covert states.
Those new to TEI may leave the session with a new understanding of an encoder’s role: they are not merely handling metadata, such as names, dates, or residencies, but also engaging in a deep reading of the text with an informed and scholarly perspective to make sophisticated interpretive decisions. Attendees from UBC and SFU brought up important questions about specific situations: How do you handle a person whose death date is unknown versus those who are still alive? How do you encode a place that is imaginary rather than physical? What if someone’s self-identification differs from their social designation?
The answer is almost always: it depends on the project and the encoder’s investigative stance. According to Joey Takeda, DHIL’s developer and host of the session, even encoding personae can be done in different ways: whether to encode it as two distinct persons or as multiple personae of the same individual depends on your editorial and interpretive frameworks.
Although there are databases like the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) to link entities to, an encoder’s self-built authority record with selected, project-specific information reveals key analytical decisions made and often who made them, which helps to clearly mark individual intellectual labour within a larger collaborative project. As Sydney Lines remarked during a break, one of TEI’s key strengths is how it externalizes and records the encoder’s thought process: much like marginalia or sticky notes, it shows the encoder’s initial deliberations, a vital form of the research process that remains largely invisible in traditional forms of scholarship such as research papers or dissertations. TEI allows these interpretive processes to become part of the project itself—visible, traceable, and iteratively useful for both the encoder and other researchers working on the same or similar materials in the future. New to TEI and considering developing a highly ambitious critical edition project of his own research interests, Markus Hallensleben, an Associate Professor from the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies also mentioned how “great it was to connect with colleagues and students to also discuss decolonial approaches to TEI, and I am very thankful to all organizers and especially to Joey for his very helpful presentation(s).”
Learning from watching how other people encode is not enough. Individual and group activities are embedded into the sessions, such as creating an authority record for Canadian writer E. Pauline Johnson. As Chapman explains, “Learning to encode with TEI-XML is like learning a new language. It takes hands-on experience to fully master the grammar.”
After lunch, Takeda introduced Vertexer, a geolocation tool developed by the University of Victoria’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC). For people like Chapman, who integrates mapping projects related to her Eaton research underway, Vertexer introduced immediate solutions. The tool allows researchers to geolocate an area and export directly into a TEI editor, complete with custom-drawn features tailored to specific research needs. As we walked out together, Chapman told me about a small parcel of land once gifted to the Eaton sisters’ fatherland she now plans to geolocate and encode using Vertexer.
Sarah Revilla, a fourth-year PhD student in Hispanic Studies at UBC, was also at the session. Interested in archiving and encoding contemporary graffiti murals in Mexico, she described the sessions as useful for both learning and social connections.
“I’m still learning how to encode using TEI,” she said. “In these in-person workshops, I get to interact with other people who are using the same tools and might have the same questions. It’s rare to find TEI workshops like these.” Before attending, Revilla had wondered how to encode unnamed individuals—especially relevant for graffiti artists who often remain anonymous. Through conversations with hosts and fellow attendees, she found not just ideas but practical solutions.
The TEI Summer Sessions are free and open to all researchers interested in digital humanities and text encoding. The final session, focusing on encoding languages, speech, and thought, will be held on August 11 at UBC’s Digital Scholarship Lab. For anyone curious about how to bring texts to life through encoding, it offers a rare opportunity to learn, practice, and connect in community, delivering an inspiring close to the summer.