At Burnaby Village Museum, we have a collection of ethnographically coded, oral history interview transcripts. We are applying TEI encoding to illustrate and emphasize this thematic analysis of each transcript, rather than descriptive, in-text encoding.

Here are some features of TEI we are making use of:

• Robust metadata to capture the context of the interview.
• We use <category/> for the controlled ethnographic code listing nested under <classDecl> in a hierarchy.

We are using <standOff/> to encode our thematic analyses within each interview. We are using this because:

• In general, each sentence requires the application of several ethnographic codes, at once.
• It is possible to have a paragraph in which all sentences have, for example, four uniform ethnographic codes, while one sentence within the block must be coded with five.
• The addition of new codes in the future is more easily accommodated.

Using the codes, we intend for these TEI encoded files to become:

• A way of searching our oral history collection for granular themes within lines and utterances.
• A way of reporting on the recurrence and nature of the content across the oral history collection.
• Providing an example for other oral history scholars to make use of and render in the future.

Things still being considered:

• This method relies heavily on the transcript line numbers for codes, and therefore each sentence of the transcript must be TEI encoded.
• The <standOff/> notation lies outside content blocks at the end of the file and is therefore difficult to read manually.
• We must integrate XQuery to make full use of the potential of cross-document analysis.
• We are considering how to store these files with the Museum’s existing databases, for continuity of the project.