This presentation reports on the methodology and challenges of building digital dictionary data for the Hatoma-Japanese Dictionary, a comprehensive linguistic resource for the Hatoma language, one of the endangered languages spoken in the Yaeyama islands, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. The dictionary consists of over 16,000 entries and provides thorough documentation of the language and culture of Hatoma Island. Recently, audio databases of its headwords and examples have been published online.

The Hatoma Yaeyaman language is classified as a South Ryukyuan language; all languages in this group are endangered, and proficient speakers are mostly confined to the elderly. Amidst emerging efforts to revitalize regional languages across the Yaeyama Islands, a digital dictionary featuring bilingual lookup, faceted search, and audio resources is essential for younger learners. To this end, we are compiling XML-encoded dictionary data based on TEI Lex-0. Developed by the EU-DARIAH Working Group on Lexical Resources, TEI Lex-0 is a forked schema of TEI that aims to provide a clearer and more unambiguous rule set for lexicographers.

Building upon the previous work of Nakagawa and Miyagawa (2023), we successfully translated most of the existing structures from the original book to the TEI Lex-0 framework. We encountered challenges in three primary areas and propose solutions for them:

• Cultural Content: The dictionary focuses on songs—a cultural pillar of the language—necessitating new ways to accommodate lyrics and metadata in the absence of specific elements for verses.

• Data Canonicalization: The original data contains unstructured definition texts with numerous free markups, which complicates the process of canonicalization for accurate structure detection.

• Schema Limitations: Currently, TEI Lex-0 does not support <media> or <ruby> elements. Furthermore, minor attribute values require further codification to allow for more precise descriptions within East Asian linguistic environments.

There is an increasing need for methods to encode algorithmic or programmatic content in digital humanities projects. For example, a comprehensive digital edition of an interactive novel must include some means to express the work's state transition logic. The predominant solution to this problem is to simply embed code written in a conventional programming language, such as JavaScript or Python, in a TEI document. However, such languages are unsuited to digital preservation because programs written in them require huge, brittle webs of transitive dependencies. Will code which relies on particular versions of dozens of Python packages, a particular version of Python itself, and a particular operating system still be executable in 5 years, yet alone 100?

In computer science, it is common practice to express algorithms in pseudocode. However, pseudocode, as the name suggests, is not actually code and has no precise computational meaning. The programming language Algol (in its various incarnations) was in fact first specified as a standard notation, with a formal semantics, for describing algorithms. But as Algol fell into disuse, so did the notion of a standard, executable notation for algorithms.

In this paper I introduce AlgolML, a new, XML-based executable notation for algorithms and computer programs, designed to function as a companion technology to TEI. Unlike nearly all programming languages, the AlgolML standard includes a formal specification of its semantics. As a programming language, AlgolML is conservative in its design, but includes unique features related to digital preservation and draws inspiration from the related notion of Permacomputing. Crucially, AlgolML is easily implementable: a conforming implementation should run no more than a few thousand lines of code in any common programming language. This property of AlgolML ensures that algorithms and programs so encoded will continue to be interpretable as long as the specification itself persists.

Mapping Materiality: Formalising structural representation for the <objectContents> element

In 2019, after having created elements like <object> and <objectIdentifier>, I added a provisional note to the TEI Guidelines chapter on Names, Dates, People, and Places to signal ongoing generalisation of the manuscript-centric elements in the context of the <object> element:

“Please note: The object element is a recent addition to TEI P5 Guidelines as of version 3.5.0 and as such might be more prone to further revision in the next few releases as its use develops. This may be particularly evident where its contents have been borrowed from msDesc and have yet to be generalized from their use in the context of manuscript descriptions.”(https://tei-c.org/Vault/P5/4.11.0/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ND.html#NDOBJ)

While some elements later had additional tweaks that mostly involved changing their description slightly to allow for their use in describing objects rather than manuscripts and early-printed books, by and large no further modifications were made.

One remaining target for modification inside the <object> element was its wholesale inclusion of the <msContents> element. This element gives encoders a way to describe “the intellectual content of a manuscript, manuscript part, or other object either as a series of paragraphs or as a series of structured manuscript items”.(https://tei-c.org/Vault/P5/4.11.0/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-msContents.html) As mentioned, the ‘or other object’ part of this and other element descriptions was added in the process of creating the <object> element and integrating it with the existing TEI framework. Nevertheless, there was a desire to duplicate the functionality of the <msContents> and modify it for the more general case of describing objects.

This short paper will discuss the creation of a more generalised <objectContents> element and whether the corresponding sub-structures of <msItem> and <msItemStruct> truly need to also be replaced in an object-agnostic form of description.

One co-author has argued¹ both that our encoding strategies must balance our desire for expressivity on the one hand against our desire for conformance and understandability on the other, and that while the TEI system deliberately makes it easy for documents to be interchangeable, it has made it all but impossible for generic TEI files to be interoperable.

One particularly important type of interoperability to consider, if not have, is the ability to write software that is able to do something useful (e.g., produce passable HTML output) from any valid input TEI file, i.e. from a generic TEI file rather than one that meets the criteria established by a particular customization.

While we do not think favoring interchangeability over interoperability is a bad thing (as we believe that, in general, the more we reach for interoperability the more we squelch expressivity and thus impair individual researchers), we do believe these decisions should be made deliberately, and that there may be cases in which TEI eschews interoperability for little or no benefit, in that particular TEI encodings make it harder to write software that processes generic TEI files.

In this presentation we will provide specific examples where the design of the TEI system makes writing generic software harder, some for little or no gain. We will further attempt to provide our thoughts, where applicable, on how a new TEI project might sidestep some of these issues; and for others suggest that TEI Council may wish to consider modifications to P5, or revamp how these issues are handled in P6.

Note

¹ See https://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol7/html/Bauman01/BalisageVol7-Bauman01.html.

We are all familiar with the date format used on @when: YYYY-MM-DD. It originated in ISO 2014 (published 1976-04) which was superseded by ISO 8601 (published 1988-06).¹
P5 provides three sets of attributes for recording a formal representation of a temporal expression: 1) @when and friends (@notBefore, @notAfter, @from, & @to from att.datable.w3c), 2) @when-iso and friends (@when-iso, @notBefore-iso, @notAfter-iso, @from-iso, & @to-iso from att.datable.iso), and 3) @when-custom and friends. The first set allows users to record a limited set of temporal expressions using the formats supported by the W3C, which are a subset of ISO 8601:2004. While not the main focus of this presentation, some time will be spent discussing their advantages & disadvantages. (The main disadvantage is that these formats are quite limiting, e.g., there is no way to express a time precise only to the hour or minute — all times must be precise to the second (or decimal fraction thereof). The enormous advantage of these formats is they are already supported by various computer systems, XSLT and XQuery processors in particular.)
The second set allows users to record a somewhat less limited set of temporal expressions using the formats supported by ISO 8601:2004. Some of these formats are unavailable via att.datable.w3c, but may still be useful; e.g. imprecise times, decimal fractions of less precise units, and recurring time intervals. However, these values cannot be handled easily by XPath; in fact, this author is not aware of any out-of-the-box software that will know how to handle these values.
The third set allows users to record temporal expressions however they like, and is mentioned here only for completeness.
Since P5 was published ISO 8601 has gotten a major overhaul, published in two parts in 2019. ISO 8601:2019, apparently based heavily on the US Library of Congress “Extended Date/Time Format”,² allows formal representation of quite a few types of temporal expression that TEI encoders might find quite useful. E.g., expression of uncertainty or approximation (or both), disjunction, and conjunction. But again, there is little to no software support for these formats.
This presentation will

• present some of the capabilities of ISO 8601:2019;
• point users to a profile of ISO 8601:2019 with detailed examples intended for a DH audience;³
• argue that it is high time for TEI to update @when-iso (and friends) such that they are based on 8601:2019 rather than 8601:2004;
• suggest a method for allowing users to say “no, I will stick to ISO 8601:2004” in their customization files; and
• (if sufficient time remaining) demonstrate code for validation of attribute values that (are supposed to) conform to the profile that was presented.

Notes
¹ P1 referred only to ISO 2014; P2 refers to both of them a bit schizophrenically; P3 & P4 still have ISO 2014 in the bibliography, but do not actually refer to it; P5 does not mention ISO 2014.
² https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/
³ Yes, a bit of self-promotion, here: https://github.com/NEU-DSG/wwp-public-code-share/tree/main/docs/dates_and_times_in_DH

Generative AI (GenAI) offers the possibility to support many steps in the creation of digital scholarly editions (DSE), e.g., the production of transcriptions from digital images, the addition of TEI-markup, and the preparation of web presentations (Pollin et al., 2025). There are established procedures and tools for all these steps in the DSE workflow. What is new is that GenAI chatbots make methods easily accessible to users from a single platform via conversation with the bot. With its ubiquity and potential for supporting scholarly work, GenAI should be considered as teaching and learning content in DH (Fritsche and Münster, 2024).

In the summer semester of 2026, a seminar for students of the humanities (German Studies) will be offered at the University of Rostock in which they will work together on a DSE of dramatic works of Sophie Tieck (Dramatische Fantasien, 1804). The seminar runs for 13 weeks, two hours per week. After familiarizing ourselves with the author, her work, and the historical context, we will go through the steps involved in creating an edition and subsequently test how GenAI can help to implement it. A GenAI chatbot using the Gemma 4 model, hosted on a university server, is used, so that there are no constraints for the students. The aim is to create an edition prototype of Tieck’s dramas. Part of the seminar is to discuss and test how GenAI may (1) support the preparation of historical literary texts in digital format, (2) support learning about digital editing methods, (3) be employed in a setting of collaborative work in the classroom using Git. This short paper will present the setup and results of the seminar and reflect on the added value, challenges, and limitations that the use of GenAI brings to DH teaching with regard to digital editions.

How might expanding the range of material formats encoded within a project help draw students’ attention to features of the underlying media in question? Here, collaboration with The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) holds the potential to shed light. Historically, MoEML’s guidance for encoding primary source transcriptions has been calibrated to parameters of print, as the majority of documents within its project database were initially produced in that medium.[1] Yet the project’s ability to make early modern London’s broader document-based environment accessible and available raises the question of how a range of manuscript texts might best be encoded in relation to the current corpus.

To reflect upon parameters by which students might contribute to work along these lines, as is being envisioned for a Spring 2027 pedagogical partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this short paper will focus upon the encoding of indentures as case study, given these manuscript documents’ capacity to serve as both legal and technical infrastructure. Understanding the challenges that this deceptively simple document type may present requires simultaneously considering its early modern significance alongside its potential for facilitating project-specific connections—a dual function that likewise makes the genre crucial for a developing MoEML micro-site, Browsing the Bookshops in St. Paul’s Churchyard, of which students’ encoded documents are planned to become part.

Building upon existing and emerging guidance, including that of the Women Writers’ Project (WWP) and Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO), the paper will consider both the nature of key challenges currently envisioned and strategies for engaging students as collaborators in the wider endeavor.

[1] For MoEML’s “Encode a Primary Source Transcription” guidance, see https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/encoding_primary_sources.htm. MoEML also contains a number of born-digital documents, as its project documentation notes.

Text encoding for East Asian and Japanese (EAJ) texts—especially practices guided by the TEI Guidelines—has not diffused widely in Japan, creating a persistent obstacle to sustainable international sharing and cross-corpus research. To address this gap, the SIG East Asian/Japanese, established in 2016, has continued community-based efforts to promote TEI-oriented encoding. Since 2024, this trajectory has been strengthened through a program supported by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, bringing international text encoding onto the national research-policy agenda. In parallel, Japan’s National Diet Library has released free OCR software that provides TEI output, indicating that TEI adoption is increasingly supported at an infrastructural level.

At the same time, outside the context of the humanities, Japan has also seen a range of independent initiatives in text encoding. Widely used formats include the Aozora Bunko markup and various forms of Markdown and their derivatives. When annotation is not embedded directly in the text, RDF is also commonly employed. Although RDF statements can be expressed using <standOff>, doing so still requires a solid understanding of the underlying data model. Consequently, effective education in text encoding cannot be achieved by teaching TEI alone. It must also address the roles, affordances, and limitations of coexisting formats and make interoperability strategies explicit—particularly through data conversion between TEI and other representations, and through TEI-centered transformations that enable heterogeneous datasets to interoperate, even though generative AI can now help draft such conversions and workflows.

Against this background, and with attention to the distinctive features of EAJ texts as they bear on encoding design, we are developing a TEI textbook that integrates TEI instruction with conversion-oriented pedagogy across multiple encoding ecosystems. This presentation reports the textbook’s scope and structure and situates it within these institutional and technological shifts.

A classic question to ask of any piece of hardware with a screen (and quite a few without) is, “but can it run DOOM?” – a question to which the answer is almost always yes. Though this paper isn’t quite so ambitious as to propose a method of running DOOM itself within a TEI-encoded document (yet), it does explore the ways in which TEI encoding can help us understand the broader field of DOOM’s vast network of mods, modders, toolmakers, and creators.

This initial exploration discusses possibilities for encoding metadata and some limited level information for the more than 14,000 mods for DOOM and DOOM II catalogued by Doomworld.com and the /idgames archive. Beyond analyzing how to adapt TEI standards to this particular kind of born-digital materials, this project is interested in tracing the evolution of DOOM modding over more than thirty years. What tools have modders used and created, and how has their usage shifted with new technological developments? Who makes mods, and how do the connections between individual modders and modding teams evolve? What do modders’ readme files tell us about their motivations and goals? How permeable is the boundary between a “mod” and an entirely novel game? This project seeks to investigate all these questions and more, and this presentation will serve as a first look at our findings.

The Voynich Manuscript remains one of the most enigmatic and undeciphered texts in the history of manuscript studies. Despite extensive scholarly attention, research has often been hindered by the manuscript’s undeciphered script, complex visual organization, and limited interoperability between textual and visual data. This project addresses these challenges through a digital humanities approach that re-encodes the manuscript’s herbal section within a structured TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) framework.

Using René Zandbergen’s widely used transliteration files as a foundation, this project transforms existing plaintext transliterations into a semantically structured TEI file designed for scholarly research. This project treats each illustrated plant as a discrete, encoded entity. By identifying and organizing plant illustrations within the TEI format, the project manages to systematically link transliterated text to corresponding botanical imagery while preserving the manuscript's unique glyphs and visual layout.

This structured encoding makes the Voynich Maniscript more machine-readable, searchable, and computationally accessible. Ultimately, this work demonstrates how careful TEI encoding can transform a famously opaque manuscript into a structured research environment, providing digital humanists, manuscript scholars, and students with new tools to explore one of history’s most persistent textual mysteries.

As the call for papers foregrounds, the TEI has been the standard for modeling textual information for over 40 years. This short paper reports on the staticization work of the Yellow Nineties (Y90s), a project that has relied on the TEI for 20 years. The leading resource for the study of this emerging publishing genre, the Y90s site offers digital editions of the complete print runs of eight magazines produced between 1889 and 1905. The site’s critical introductions and peer-reviewed biographies enable users to gain insight into the magazines’ material formats, alternative modes of production, intermedial connections, and transnational networks of contributors, as well as their involvement in contemporary social movements, such as environmentalism, feminism, sexual rights, socialism, and nationalist revivals. A world renowned resource, whose data has been shared across projects for scholarship and teaching (Hughes; Mahoney and Abrams), the Y90s also “demonstrates best practice for digital Victorian site [content] in a manner matched by few peer projects. The site shows that such projects can focus in a rigorous manner on primary content, while also meeting international standards for digital development, preservation, documentation, and transparency” (Wisnicki, 981).

The project, has undergone a number of technological transformations: from plans for ColdFusion, to TEI and HTML underpinned by a MySQL database, and then WordPress. In order to ensure sustainability, the Y90s is taking up the Endings Project’s static site development methodology (Holmes and Takeda). The Endings-informed staticization process has not only given us the opportunity to consider Humanities-appropriate FAIR compliance, but also the occasion to engage best data development practices developed by values aligned organizations including CWRC, Homosuarus, and RTPP, with the goal of having Yellow Nineties 3.0 live up to our billing as a project that meets the “international standards for digital development, preservation, documentation, and transparency.”

This presentation proposes a TEI-compliant structured model for kibyōshi, a genre of classical Japanese books, through the integration of TEI encoding and IIIF image resources.

Kusazōshi were illustrated fiction published in Japan from the mid-seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Among them, kibyōshi emerged as a distinct subgenre in the late eighteenth century. Each work typically consists of a short narrative of approximately 10 to 30 pages. With the exception of the preface and postscript, nearly all pages are illustrated, and the main text and dialogue are written in the blank spaces of the images, creating a close interdependence between visual and textual elements.
Kibyōshi incorporates diverse themes—including theater, folktales, moral instruction, waka poetry, customs, and Buddhism—expressed through both image and text. Despite their limited length, these works contain remarkable thematic variety.
Although the TEI Guidelines provide various methods for encoding relationships between images and text, these approaches have not been sufficiently systematized. As a result, multiple encoding practices coexist, hindering interoperable processing and viewer development.
This presentation reports on a practical implementation of TEI-based structuring for kibyōshi in conjunction with IIIF image resources. Image information was encoded using elements such as <facsimile>, <graphic>, and <surface>, while specific regions were defined with <zone> and linked to textual components via the @facs attribute, enabling bidirectional referencing.
This implementation demonstrates that correspondences between image regions and textual elements can be consistently encoded within the TEI framework. The resulting model offers a reusable approach applicable to other early modern illustrated works in which image and text function in a mutually complementary manner.

This paper will demonstrate some ways that the rich information modeled in TEI documents can be used for text and network analysis. The Women Writers Project (WWP), a long-term research project focused on text encoding and early women’s writing, has recently begun developing methods for using encoded texts in computational analyses. As part of the WWP’s work on making word embedding models more accessible for humanists, we published a set of routines that use XSLT and XQuery to prepare TEI files for computational text analysis. These routines provide a set of fine-tuning options that are targeted to the needs of natural language processing applications. For example, the contents of notes can be placed either at their points of anchor or in a separate section in the plain-text output files; the transformation routines also enable researchers to select and omit any elements whose contents are likely to distort results in trained models. In a current project studying the impacts of women on the development of the sciences, the WWP team has built two new transformation routines, both in XQuery. One expands on the plain-text generation process described above to allow selection of researcher-defined “documents” for topic modeling, based on how texts’ structures are modeled in the markup. The other uses bibliographic markup to extract information on co-citation within texts and produce edge lists for network analysis. This paper will share some insights that the WWP has developed through our efforts to realize the potential of TEI documents for computational analysis. It will also offer some strategies for projects interested in taking up such work with their own data, with approaches for adapting existing resources, making the most of provisional solutions, and iterating between data retrieval and research design.

Digital scholarly editions, while differing in editorial goals, encoding depth, and source material, share many operational steps—digitisation, OCR, validation, transformation, publication, versioning, and archiving. Often, these steps are either done manually and/or implemented in project-specific scripts.

This paper presents a workflow automation tool freeing editors and developers of infrastructure from the necessity to perform these repeating tasks themselves. It combines several well-established tools to create flexible workflows that can easily be adapted to a projects needs while still being rooted on the same operational principles, combining the need to adjust a workflow to a project’s needs with a sustainable and scalable infrastructure.

The workflow integrates OCR and layout recognition, post processing, schema validation, version control, publication, and long-term archiving, allowing for fully automated flows and manual intervention as needed. Workflow orchestration is implemented using Prefect, a lightweight, Python-based framework that enables event-driven and sequential execution of discrete tasks. Each step is explicitly defined, logged, and documented, ensuring traceability and reproducibility as well as enabling projects to add or modify steps as required.

Such a workflow enforces consistent TEI structures through automated validation and controlled transformations, supporting interoperability across platforms and facilitating reuse—and consistent tagging is an important cornerstone in creating sustainable editions.

Automation has two important impacts besides reducing repetitive tasks: large amounts of texts can be easily converted to TEI—which might be prohibitively time consuming when done manually–, and it means that a basic TEI representation of a text can be easily and quickly realised, improving access to written heritage.

This panel focuses on the theoretical perspectives gained in “The Lyon in Mourning” Digital Humanities Project, a partnership project between the National Library of Scotland and Simon Fraser University’s Research Centre for Scottish Studies and Digital Humanities Innovation Lab focused on the digitization, TEI encoding and analysis of an eighteenth-century manuscript, “The Lyon in Mourning.” Compiled by Jacobite Episcopalian minister Robert Forbes after the suppression of the last civil war in mainland Britain, the 1745-46 Jacobite Rising, “The Lyon in Mourning” consists of 2148 pages of transcribed conversations, narrative accounts, poems, songs, letters, epitaphs and even material relics such as scraps of fabric and pieces of a boat. It is an extraordinary document in British history, compiled to preserve the memories of those on the losing side of the Jacobite conflict. It is also a remarkable document in the history of text encoding: not only do the ten volumes serve as an early “hypertext” with various cross-references and footnotes throughout the collection, but Forbes’s meticulously compiled manuscript also seems to anticipate the methodological protocols of the TEI, featuring careful documentation on the biographical, bibliographical and presentational metadata about his source material. This project unsettles standard histories of Britain as it focuses on the extent and nature of Jacobite activity in post-1745 Britain, highlighting the voices of women, Gaelic-speakers and labouring-class individuals in the manuscript. Our project also contributes to an alternative history of media as it suggests the importance of manuscript as an eighteenth-century form of modern information technology. An important part of this project has been the knowledge mobilization connected to it both locally and internationally.

The panel will consist of 5 presentations and a discussion of the implications of the research and the knowledge mobilization opportunities it has provided, locally, nationall and internationally from public talks, to radio programs, to workshops on transcription and quill pen writing.

Leith Davis (Professor, Department of English, Simon Fraser University and PI for the Project): “Introducing ‘The Lyon in Mourning’ Digital Humanities Project’: Unsettling British History Through Creating New Interdisciplinary Connections”

Joey Takeda (Developer, Digital Humanities Innovation Lab, Simon Fraser University): Short Online Tour of “The Lyon in Mourning” Project

Shauna Irani (English Department, Simon Fraser University): “Encoding the Unsung: Ned Burke and ‘The Lyon in Mourning’”

Abigail Streifel (English Department, Simon Fraser University): “Encoding Place in Robert Forbes’s ‘Seasonable Visit’ of 1769”

Julianna Wagar (Department of English, Film, and Creative Writing, University of Alberta): “2000 Oysters and 35 Dozen ‘Egges’: James Gib’s Meticulous Listmaking”

With this panel, the Technical Council publicly announces the beginning of serious work on a P6 version of the TEI Guidelines. We want to discuss how we arrived at this decision and how we plan to proceed, and we welcome input from the community at this crucial stage.

That there have only been five major versions of the TEI Guidelines to date seems a sign of robust permanence. P1, P2, and P3 appeared within roughly a decade while TEI was under development in the 1990s and early 2000s. The change from P3 to P4 marked the move from Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) to eXtensible Markup Language (XML). The move from P4 to P5 introduced the system for organizing elements and content models by subscription to classes, and more fully embraced XML namespaces, non-DTD schema languages, and URI identity referencing.

Launching a new proposal indicates a fundamental change, and we do not make this decision lightly. Following the "Birnbaum principle", “such transitions should only happen in response to the emergence of new technologies (e.g., the transition from SGML to XML) or the development of a new architecture that conveys substantial benefit (e.g., the development of the new class system)”.

In 2007, P5 v. 1.0.0 included 503 elements; today P5 v. 4.11.0 has 588 elements organized in 21 distinct modules and an intricate system of model and attribute classes. Council finds that it is often very difficult to introduce new features, fix longstanding issues, and reduce redundancy in TEI P5 without having to disrupt the class structure, and scholarly developers often find it difficult to adapt the TEI's highly complicated schema to real projects. It is too easy for a project to break conformance with the TEI while its developers do not fully understand good reasons why conformance is broken. We want customization to be simpler for our scholarly community, and we are re-evaluating and giving ourselves a fresh start with P6 to reconsider how we construct our content models and our schema. If we are successful, the P6 we design should be a form of TEI that is more tractable for all of us to learn, apply, customize, and develop.

Discussing the TEI long ago, C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen is recalled to have said, "schemas exist on a continuum from enabling to enforcing." Perhaps we can understand the TEI as a balance of enabling flexibility and constraints that we support as a community. Our Guidelines have been refined over many years with many voices from around the world. While the TEI's early forms reflected a strong emphasis on European print and manuscript works, we are no longer the same TEI we once were: our community is more diverse and our projects represent a wider range of texts, including "born digital" resources, writing on objects, and non-Western scripts. Our community has strengthened the TEI by introducing a wider range of features and methods for text encoding than originally anticipated by our first editors.

Because so much has changed, the Technical Council finds that it is time to re-evaluate our priorities, to revise the TEI in such a way as no longer to be backwards-compatible with P5, yet to continue the expression of the TEI in eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Council agrees that XML is the most robust way to express our community's encoding principles, but that there is much to improve and change about our methods of modeling information.

Council will begin serious work on an approach to P6 during a three-day face-to-face meeting in Würzburg, Germany in March 2026. At the time of this writing, that meeting is two weeks in the future, but Council plans to address topics about P6 that we want to share and discuss with the TEI community at the 2026 conference. We propose a panel involving members of the TEI Technical Council to share highlights and key points of controversy that emerge from our face-to-face session.

Together with the audience, the panelists plan to address a number of crucial questions, including but not limited to the following:

• Why is it time for P6? Why should we not just continue to add feature requests to P5?

• As we develop P6, we plan to continue supporting P5 in "maintenance mode". What will that mean?

• Will there be a period of accepting feature requests to support P5 while developing P6?

• Will the elements we know from P5 persist in P6? Are we going to try to reduce or expand the number of elements?

• Will models and classes persist in P6, but not in a way that's compatible with P5? Or will we create an entirely different system of organizing TEI elements and attributes?

• Where and how is P6 being developed? How will our supporting infrastructure change?

• Will there be parallel serializations alongside XML?