The Michael Sperberg-McQueen Digital Nachlass ensures the preservation of Sperberg-McQueen’s digital legacy by creating an accessible archive, built to modern standards of digital preservation. All materials will be archived according to international best practices, providing multiple access layers, and made public for research projects as well as for didactic activities to the extent we legally can. The CMSMcQ archive was created in 2025 and is currently operating based on a limited amount of institutional support from the University of Cologne and private donations. We are already working on a funding bid to further develop the project and continue expanding—and as far as possible fulfilling—the potential of the digital archive.

The initial phase of our project focuses on the publication of a bibliography of Sperberg-McQueen’s work, with links to online versions of his published work whenever possible: research articles, webpages, blogs, standards, source code, and running systems. Taking the cue from the modelling discussions found in the CMSMcQ archive, as part of the long tradition of text modelling, we ask what the best formalism for representing complex texts is.

TEI has always used graph formalisms to represent text. Both SGML and TEI represent hierarchical, rooted, ordered, simple, undirected, connected, acyclic graphs, that is, a type of trees. Already in the 1990s, other graphs formalisms were suggested, but had a limited application due to a lack of formal validation systems and also a lack of useful tools. While some sort of cyclic structure can be expressed in XML using XML ID/IDREF links, and this is highly useful for TEI, this is rather an addition to the XML structure than an extension of it, especially when it comes to validation.

Using a less strict graph formalism for text encoding, for instance by including cycles, one can still use significant parts of TEI. We will show examples of encoded documents where the element names and their meaning (as expressed in the text of the TEI Guidelines) are mostly kept. To what extent the meaning changes is one of our research questions we look forward to discussing at the conference. We will also show how the development in user friendly graph encoding and visualisation systems has made the use of less restricted graph formalisms more available, also outside experimental setting. Further to that, we will suggest some consequences for the integration with external ontologies and other knowledge representation systems.

How to develop meaningful translation paths from graph based encoding to XML based TEI? We will show some examples and discuss to what extent the semantics of the encoding can be kept, and to what extent the result will be human readable. We will also discuss how the very conception of a less restricted graph is a scholarly endeavour that uncovers new dimensions of the materials. The flexibility granted by the chosen framework, paired with the development of a rule system for our graphs which enable syntactic graph validation, allow for a higher degree of intellectual creativity and bottom-up modelling compared to other methodologies.

The long-term project "Forschungsportal BACH" (since 2023), a collaboration between the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig and the Bach Archive Leipzig, aims to document, digitally process, and publish all surviving archival documents relating to the musically active members of Johann Sebastian Bach's family from the late 16th to the early 19th century. The corpus is structurally and semantically heterogeneous and includes private and official correspondence, legal and administrative documents, teaching materials, account books, petitions, and composite manuscript units with transcripts and appendices. Letters represent only a small portion of this material.

Unlike edition projects that focus on a single genre, the diversity and scope of this corpus require an encoding strategy that is both flexible and sustainable. Rather than conceptualizing TEI encoding as a single-stage editorial process, our project has developed a distributed modeling approach in which encoding decisions are temporally and technically divided across multiple environments.

Our workflow includes digitizing documents in archives, storing both data and images in our database, recognizing handwritten text and structural annotations in Transkribus, exporting to PAGE XML, automatically converting to TEI P5 via XSLT, and then adding semantic enrichment in a mostly customized TEI Publisher annotation environment. Structural and layout-related features are primarily captured in the HTR environment, where document segmentation and formal features are identified early in the process. These decisions are then mapped to TEI during automated conversion. In a later phase, editors perform more detailed semantic annotation which is not restricted to conventional named-entity tagging but aims to maximize the informational yield of each document through differentiated semantic markup. The information in the respective documents is automatically supplemented by metadata from the associated database. Furthermore, for correspondence, additional CMIF data are generated to ensure interoperability with correspSearch.

This paper discusses that such a workflow shifts TEI encoding from a singular editorial moment to a multi-stage, tool-dependent process. Automated routines help manage task transitions across stages, ensuring a smooth progression from one environment to the next. Three methodological implications of this redistribution are examined:

(1) the impact of early structural annotation in the HTR environment on later processing flexibility;

(2) the role of automated transformation scripts in mediating between layout-oriented and semantics-oriented representations;

(3) the balance between efficiency and scholarly control in large-scale heterogeneous corpora.

Drawing on concrete encoding cases, we evaluate how decisions made at different stages influence validation, consistency, and interoperability. Consistency is ensured through controlled transformation routines and structured annotation guidelines across environments.

By viewing encoding as a distributed and iterative process, the paper contributes to current discussions on TEI workflows in complex archival contexts. It suggests that large-scale heterogeneous edition projects require a reconceptualization of encoding as a multilayered process shaped as much by technical infrastructures and tool logics as by editorial interpretation.

The adoption of the eventName element by the TEI in Fall 2023, promised a new way for researchers encoding historical documents to annotate occurrences in ways similar to those we use to recognize people, places, and organizations. Understandably, there was some question at the time about what constitutes an event, or what rises to the level of an event. Ultimately, among the examples chosen when the element was published included what might be described as significant events (those worthy of 'proper noun' status): World War II, the 1618 Defenestration of Prague, and the TEI 2019 Conference (!) I would suggest that these are events by consensus – occurrences that are notable because many people agreed to confer named fame to them.

And yet, encoding archival materials that are contemporaneous with such famous phenomena (in my case performances connected to political occasions in early modern London) there is a lack of explicit references to 'proper noun' events like the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth I, the English victory over the Spanish Armada, or the Marriage of Princess Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V. Rather, in correspondence, personal diaries, municipal and financial records studied as part of the REED London project, I have realized that people are more likely to focus on what are really nested or micro-events undertaken in relation to those phenomena, but which are contextually important because of the micro-event itself: production of a masque, procession through the streets of London, a mock sea-battle on the River Thames. All of these performance events were planned, funded, performed by, and witnessed by unnamed Londoners as well as notable people. The records and eyewitness accounts that describe the performances sometimes refer obliquely to a super-event (coronation, victory, wedding festivities) but not always, and the focus of the people who wrote the letters, organized the dances, and tracked the expenses clearly was on the business of the production. But are these events that rise to the level that the TEI Council envisioned? At what point do the details about planning, production, and observation of a performance collapse under the weight of a tagged document?

In the past year I have collaborated with a group of researchers extending the Linked Art ontology to include to better represent performing arts data (which is itself an extension of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model). Using the Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn as the first test of a very complex example of this type of nested event, I have been trying to create lemma-level connections between the richly-encoded TEI files that reveal components of the preparation and production of the Masque evidenced in the REED London records and the structured LAPA data model. In this paper I will present the progress I am making in making meaningful connections between TEI event structures and the LAPA modeling techniques. In doing so I will consider how far we can push the eventName element to sustain such connections, and when those connections necessarily break, or must be adjusted.

This paper focuses on the effect of categorization on historical tacit knowledge, in line with the TEI 2026 themes of “Data Interoperability" (or “Cross-Domain Application”). Within the constellation of my research, I propose to shift the center of gravity away from “Let’s categorize!” to “What happens when we shape memory this way?”. This study examines how applying core ontologies to the contributions of Canadian women of impact to history and archaeology, in an equity-aware approach, reshapes how cultural knowledge is modeled and shared across disciplinary boundaries.

While linked data standards are increasingly used in digital heritage infrastructures, the humanities data remain underrepresented and difficult to model in interoperable ways[1]. Despite large-scale initiatives and DH infrastructures, there is limited evidence on how existing models accommodate humanities-specific data types, especially those carrying tacit knowledge with them, such as personal archives and local place-based knowledge, and how these are encoded with minimal structural biases[2] [3].

This gap is addressed by using data from a set of archaeological archive collections held in Canadian institutions, as a testbed for assessing the possibilities and limits of modeling interoperable cultural data on material documenting heritage management activities. These documents include notebooks, correspondence, diaries, and extensive photographic materials capturing landscapes, artefacts, and field teams. Together, they record sites and objects but also research practices, collaborations, and relationships with the land and the communities over several decades.

How can models represent people, places, events, and objects in these documents in ways that respect their historical and cultural specificity while enabling cross-structures interoperability? How do we investigate the limits encountered when encoding and assigning persistent identifiers to entities drawn from multilingual, historically layered archival descriptions; which CRM extensions can accommodate concepts specific to specific times, languages, and cultures within a broadly shared ontology?

This project combines methods from qualitative data modeling with practical TEI encoding and RDF conversion workflows. It unfolds within a theoretical space structured by (1) critical semantic modeling, turning archival description into structured markup (what counts as “entity”, how to register uncertainty, contestation?), and (2) interpretive data modeling (how entities or their relationships will be modeled, understood, read). The analysis focuses on two intertwined dimensions: (1) semantic adequacy, where CIDOC CRM for example, provides a strong fit for events or artefact production and cases where it struggles (roles exceeding standard actors categories or nuanced distinctions); and (2) interpretive/ethical implications, as we adopt an intersectional perspective to examine how modeling choices inherited from archival descriptions, and authority structures shape who and what becomes visible [4] [5].

Preliminary findings suggest that ontologies (CIDOC CRM) significantly improve interoperability across documents, but the modeling process reveals persistent gaps: historically significant distinctions important to archaeologists and communities are difficult to represent with TEI, express in CIDOC CRM and map in RDF. Additionally, authority-based identifiers often reproduce existing asymmetries in whose names and places are standardized. These observations resonate with concerns in FAIR humanities data about the risk of losing thick description and about the dependency of researchers on external infrastructures and policies.

This paper aims to implement the TEI-Guidelines on early Chinese excavated administrative documents. As the handling of these documents stretches over the academic fields of both Chinese paleography and paleo-diplomatics, the respective traditional descriptive tools of these two fields need to be reflected. Being still at a preliminary stage, this paper focuses on the paleographic features only, which early Chinese excavated administrative documents share with excavated literature.

In praxis, Chinese paleography is the art of transcribing and collating early Chinese manuscripts. In order to store information about the transcribers’ understanding of the original text within the modern transcriptions, Chinese paleography has developed a peculiar markup language. Interestingly, this traditional markup language can be easily translated into existing TEI elements and attributes. In this regard, this paper proves the high sophistication of the TEI-Guidelines rather than adding something new to them.

By contrast, a more theoretical branch of Chinese paleography, which is occupied with linguistic issues like the changes in character usage over time and in space, poses more complex semantic challenges. Basically, the paleographic understanding of Chinese characters differs hugely from that of the Unicode standard, which ultimately represents a compromise to meet multifold diverging practical demands. This gap leads to the necessity of redefining characters even in cases where Unicode seemingly provides clearly distinguishable “ideographs”. For this redefinition, this paper attempts to change the semantic meaning of <g>(gaiji) elements, linking them to paleographic character definitions within the <charDecl> element in the TEI header or in a stand-off data format.

Classically, a Chinese character is understood as the combination of form, reading, and meaning. Studies indicate stable links between reading and meaning, whereas form frequently undergoes quicker, seemingly arbitrary alterations. Certain Chinese linguists suggest concentrating on reading and meaning units as a more suitable tool for linguistic analysis of changes in character usage. Shào Yǒnghǎi邵永海 calls these units “character positions (zì wèi字位)”, the concept of “position” referring to a relatively fixed position in the semantic space in contrast to the easily changing forms of characters. This paper supports this more historical approach to Chinese characters and attempts to realize it by separating the description of “character positions” from “character forms” in the <char> and <glyph> elements within the <charDecl> element respectively.

In practical application, this redefinition of the <g> element results in all characters in the main body and the attached apparatuses being turned into <g> elements, using @ref and @ana attributes to associate them with the corresponding form and character position definitions in the <glyph> and <char> elements. This has the beneficial side effect of eliminating arbitrary text and element node mixing, converting text into homogeneous sequences of <g> elements. Combined with stand-off solutions for annotations and strict stratification of different layers of annotation, this furthermore facilitates automated collation of encoded text and complex arrangements of overlapping annotations as will be shown by means of a simple example from excavated literature.

After several years of development, the transition to the new version of the Manuscriptorium digital library was completed last autumn. The development, however, is still ongoing—the most significant and recent part of which is the TEI-compatible full-text module. As a result, Manuscriptorium offers its users an alternative core that shifts the central perspective from visual representation of digitized documents to textual content, with images serving as a complement to the texts they contain.

The overall objective is to build a solid and stable infrastructure, enabling the community of scholars as well as the general public to read, study, and research the historical texts within a wider Central European digital context. At present, the main focus lies on converting older editions of historical texts of Bohemian origin. The editions are then correlated not only with the documents forming their textual basis but also with other known witnesses, thereby reviving such editions in a broader and more dynamic context. In the extended process of establishing the exact method of data preparation, their subsequent processing, and visualization workflows, we have come across several methodological ‘nooks and crannies’ for which the current TEI Guidelines offer no proper solution. Thus, a rather creative approach was at times necessary, and even a few changes and extensions of the TEI standard in use proved unavoidable, primarily in relation to the problem of directly connecting digitized fragmentary witnesses of varying extent and content with the full texts of the editions.

From the end-user perspective, the edition module consists of two components: an application for advanced viewing of the texts integrated with the digitized images of original documents, and a catalog enabling high-granularity searching across the edition database. The essential data persistence has already been secured by the overarching Manuscriptorium resolver infrasctructure. By means of full IIIF compatibility, the texts are correlated with the digitized documents from Manuscriptorium's content core as well as from external image repositories. Parallel yet differentiated browsing of texts and images, along with the additional visualization of modern translations or transcriptional variants, has also been successfully implemented. The next developmental phase will be primarily dedicated to processing and visualizing complex critical apparatuses. On the whole, compared with other historical-text databases, our principal purpose is to provide users with highly curated—and thus reliable—textual content and to make it as accessible as possible, not least through an engaging and easy-to-navigate user interface.

In the paper, all the above-mentioned aspects of the development and the current state of the module will be discussed, with the presentation of methodological problems relating to the markup, its specifics and broader applicability, among the key objectives. Quite naturally, adhering as closely as possible to the TEI Guidelines, we aim to invite critical feedback to our work from the community best suited for it.

Traditional digital epigraphy has long relied on TEI-EpiDoc XML as the primary standard for data modeling and interchange. In the current technological landscape, digital epigraphy often navigates the apparent oxymoron between the descriptive complexity required for archiving and the high-performance efficiency demanded by responsive web interfaces. This paper introduces BEDA (Binary Epigraphic Data Archive), a Rust ecosystem that addresses this tension through a two-layer architecture: a binary archive format for metadata and digital surrogate management (including zoomable facsimile and RTI), and a dedicated epigraphic DSL for authoring critical editions.
The foundation of the system is the `beda` crate, which implements a high-efficiency recursive format based on CBOR (Concise Binary Object Representation). The choice of Rust and the mapping of the whole TEI P5 schema onto a binary-serialized, dual-stream structure ensure memory safety, efficient I/O, minimal infrastructural dependencies, archival resilience and significantly greater stability when compared to the common, dynamically typed solutions used in Digital Humanities, without sacrificing semantic richness.
IbiScript, a bespoke Domain-Specific Language grounded in the Leiden Conventions and their extended formalizations, serves as the authoring notation for critical text and apparatus. This rich yet intuitive syntax is parsed by ANSELMUS, a deterministic nom-based Rust parser producing a typed AST, and compiled to multiple output targets. A BEDA archive may embed an IbiScript edition or serve purely as a metadata and digital surrogate container, as the two layers are independent but composable. Though originally designed to work on the Middle Persian text of the Paikuli Inscription (late 3rd century CE), IbiScript's architecture supports any writing system through Unicode codepoint passthrough and a named-escape system keyed by ISO script code and glyph aliases, making it applicable across epigraphic traditions.
The ecosystem is not limited to library use, as both BEDA and IbiScript expose UNIX-style CLIs enabling scholars to compile source files and export to interactive HTML editions, EpiDoc XML, Unicode plain text, and PDF via Typst, thus spanning archival interchange and publication-ready output.
A reactive web interface, built with Leptos (`beda_ui`), supports metadata editing through forms rendered in real time from the current BEDA file and OpenSeadragon facsimile viewing, while `beda_ws` provides IMEs and writing system conversion services.
BEDA treats EpiDoc not as a native format but as one export target among several, positioning TEI XML as an interoperability and dissemination layer rather than the primary locus of data authority. Far from replacing TEI, this approach extends its reach into a compiled, type-safe infrastructure which enforces correctness at parse time, while full EpiDoc export ensures compatibility with existing tools and repositories. The Paikuli Digital Edition (PDE) portal serves as the primary design driver and proof of concept, though the ecosystem is implemented and packaged as a general-purpose epigraphic infrastructure applicable beyond any single project or script tradition.

The TEI has served as the foundation for digital scholarly editing across diverse cultural and linguistic contexts for over three decades. Despite this broad adoption, the Guidelines contain a significant gap: there is no standardized mechanism for encoding tone, a phonological feature present in approximately 70% of the world’s languages (Yip 2002; Maddieson 2013). This absence reflects structural biases within digital humanities infrastructure, where existing standards do not fully accommodate the application to non-European language families (Bowers 2020; Lukaniec & Holmes 2023; Ngué Um 2017; Thieberger & Tuohy 2017). Providing a dedicated mechanism for tone would further TEI’s commitment to internationalization and multilingualism, strengthening its legitimacy as a global standard.

Tone carries lexical and grammatical meaning across a vast range of languages, distinguishing words that would otherwise be homophonous and adding grammatical functions. Failing to represent tone is not a matter of omitting a diacritic—it is omitting meaning itself, leaving the representation linguistically incomplete. While existing TEI mechanisms, e.g., feature structures, could serve this purpose, no general recommendation exists. This results in project-specific workarounds that undermine interoperability, complicate computational analysis, and limit scholarly reuse.

Drawing on our experience creating a digital scholarly edition of a 17th-century Chinese-Spanish dictionary from colonial Manila (Döhla et al. 2022; 2024), we present both the practical consequences of this encoding gap and a concrete proposal for addressing it. The “Bocabulario de lengua sangleya por las letraz de el A.B.C.” (British Library Add ms. 25.317) documents Hokkien as spoken by Chinese immigrants in early Spanish Philippines (Döhla 2025). Because tone distinguishes lexical meaning, accurate linguistic interpretation depends on tone annotation. The current implementation employs @ana attributes linked to a SKOS-based controlled vocabulary, following the reconstructed seven tone categories for Early Manila Hokkien (Klöter 2003).

This solution is functional, but tone—as a prominent feature in the world’s languages— warrants a dedicated recommendation within the Guidelines, ensuring visibility. We therefore propose a <toneDecl> element within <encodingDesc> for declaring tone inventories, following established TEI patterns for analytical frameworks. Individual <toneDef> entries would specify @xml:id for unique identification and @type distinguishing level from contour tones based on pitch patterns. Each definition includes human-readable <label> and <desc> elements, with optional <pitch> specifications using established notational systems such as Chao tone letters. A corresponding @toneRef attribute links tone-bearing segments to their tonal definitions. The minimal attribute should accommodate typological diversity without imposing analytical assumptions, while the declaration-reference pattern maintains TEI’s separation of metadata and content. Community deliberation is required to assess whether the proposal is truly applicable cross-linguistically and suitable for different levels of linguistic description, since tone by definition applies to different aspects like phonology or morphology.

This work directly addresses TEI 2026’s call for “Creating Connections, Unsettling Practices.” Challenging Eurocentric biases in infrastructure through concrete technical proposals contributes to decolonizing digital scholarship. Enabling the encoding of fundamental linguistic features allows previously underrepresented textual traditions to receive appropriate digital representation and opens new possibilities for scholarly connection.

This paper will begin with a brief discussion of the atypical handling of unnamed and unidentified persons in the Lyon in Mourning project. TEI projects tend to emphasise named persons, but we used TEI to highlight unnamed persons as well, with three effects: to draw attention to the fullness of their historical subjectivity, to analyse patterns of silence in the text, and to invite website users to contribute identifying information to the project’s personography. Connections between naming, power, and privilege are even clearer when focus is expanded beyond the human. Although the Lyon in Mourning project is more than usually attentive to marginalised subjects, in limiting focus to human persons it remains anthropocentric, reflecting a broader problem in humanities scholarship and the TEI. The rest of the paper will: provide a cursory sketch of the many harms of anthropocentrism from a Critical Animal Studies perspective, which sees liberatory projects (such as the conference themes of anti-racism, feminism, and decolonial practice, but also animal liberation) as inextricably entangled; acquaint attendees with challenges researchers of more-than-human subjects encounter in traditional as well as digital archives; and open discussion of possible solutions through TEI methods, particularly through engagement with the proposed <entity> element, suggesting instead a <being> element that draws on Maneesha Deckha’s concept of “beingness” as a more just and capacious alternative to personhood frameworks.

As part of an interdisciplinary and international collaborative project on the Austrian-German-Mexican avant-garde artist Wolfgang Paalen (1905-59) and his collection of Indigenous belongings, we will develop the practical-strategic framework for a new, Indigenous storywork-based, decolonial approach to digitally archiving, editing, and critically analyzing primary sources in European Cultural Studies. Our relational method of decentering Paalen and recentering Indigenous knowledges will also inform our collaborative DH approach with the aim to break down and redesign the hierarchical, colonial structures embedded in current TEI text digitization technologies, whether in personography or place-mapping technology. Supported by a UBC DiSi grant our first step is to establish a cloud-based file system catalogue for already digitized archive material, so that it can be shared with Indigenous communities and collaborators when working towards a global online Paalen Archive and the first edition of Paalen's unpublished literary exile writings.

How should we design and encode taxonomies for digital projects committed to decolonization and indigenization? Drawing on work with the forthcoming Decolonization and Indigenization (DNI) bibliography project, this paper examines the technical and ethical challenges of building structured, navigable TEI-encoded data without reinscribing the hierarchies that such projects seek to unsettle.

The paper emphasizes the ethical and political aspects of schema design and TEI encoding. Rather than focusing on the mechanics of schema customization, it treats taxonomy organization, metadata encoding, and user interface design as sites of epistemological negotiation. Through examples from the DNI project, it explores how decisions about categories, controlled vocabularies, and hierarchical encoding structures shape how works, authors, and communities are represented and made discoverable. These decisions, which are often hidden in the background and treated as politically neutral, become central to the decolonizing aims of the project.

Engaging existing scholarship on decolonization and indigenization, including Gaudry and Lorenz’s spectrum of indigenization, the paper also reflects on where decolonial digital projects and their taxonomies sit within attempts to decolonize our institutions and considers the work that remains to be done. Rather than proposing a universal model, it offers a set of technical and ethical considerations for practitioners working on decolonial projects, emphasizing consultation, attentiveness to diverse user needs, and reflexivity about our own positions as technical experts.

A screening of John Melson's documentary *Always in Progress: Three Decades of the Women Writers Project* (2025), followed by a roundtable with WWP Director Dr. Julia Flanders and WWP Associate Director Dr. Sarah Connell.