Keio University has a long history of Digital Humanities activities rooted in the digitization and scholarly use of cultural heritage materials, beginning with the launch of the HUMI Project in 1996. Since 2001, DH-related teaching at Keio has expanded from undergraduate courses and postgraduate XML edition projects to graduate-level education. This institutional history should be understood against the broader background of Japanese DH, which, unlike Western contexts, where TEI has been a foundational technology of the DH ecosystem, has been characterized by a long "image-centered" period, due to the significant technical challenges of creating text data of East Asian scripts. Even before the recent advances in character recognition technologies, TEI had begun to gain wider visibility and use in Japan. More recently, those technological advances have made large-scale East Asian text data increasingly accessible.

Reflecting this shift, in these two years, Keio’s DH education has begun to shift from digitization-centered activities toward a more explicit engagement with text encoding. TEI-oriented instruction now helps students understand humanities materials as structured, shareable, and reusable research data, rather than only as images or archival objects.

This poster reports on the emerging transition from rare materials digitization to TEI practice. It focuses on the development of a learning and practice environment in which text encoding is connected to coursework, workshops, international exchange, and early-career researcher training. It also introduces TEIKeM, a newly established initiative at Keio Museum Commons, which aims to provide an institutional setting for sustaining TEI-related education and practice beyond individual courses.

Rather than presenting a specific TEI data model or textbook, this poster examines how TEI practice can be embedded within a broader Digital Humanities ecosystem.