TEI 2026: Low-cost, low-infrastructure, low-threshold strategies for authoring and publishing TEI (and friends)

This half-day workshop will introduce strategies for working with TEI with minimal resources at one’s disposal. We will discuss low-cost, low-infrastructure, and low-threshold solutions for getting started with TEI projects from authoring to publishing, with the inclusion of other related XML formats such as MEI and MathML or also LaTeX-based MathJax.

In particular, attendees will be first introduced to using the free code editor Visual Studio Code with the extension Scholarly XML. First released in 2020 and greatly updated in 2025, Scholarly XML (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=raffazizzi.sxml) has provided a lightweight and easy-to-use solution for simple TEI encoding work, such as RELAX NG and Schematron validation, and schema-aware suggestions.

Attendees will also be introduced to CETEIcean as a way of publishing TEI with minimal (or no) transformation (Cayless and Viglianti 2018). The main focus of the workshop will be learning how this approach can be used to generate simple static pages to be hosted on free services such as GitHub or Netlify. This workshop is aimed at attendees of all technical levels, including those who do not typically write code, as well as those who already have some programming experience and are interested in learning a leaner approach to TEI work.

Motivation:

Digital humanities projects that result in the creation of digital output—typically a website— are prone to what Smithies et al. call the “digital entropy of software and digital infrastructure” (2019). Static sites have become a common choice for archiving legacy projects that risk going offline (Smithies et al. 2019, Summers 2016) because they only require the absolute minimum from hosting infrastructure: a server to distribute documents at a given address. The Endings project at the University of Victoria, British Columbia (https://endings.uvic.ca/), for example, recommends static sites as a viable strategy for ensuring the longevity of Digital Humanities project publications. When projects decay, “[t]hose in charge of infrastructure are also determining, particularly in the long term, the scholarly worth of a project, whether it should remain online, and in what form” (Viglianti and del Rio Riande, 2025). In this perspective, static sites can also function as a component in a plan of ‘graceful degradation’. In this workshop, we want to explore and discuss how much TEI users and DH-project researchers and maintainers can do without relying on costly and unreliable infrastructure. The same lightweight infrastructures that support graceful degradation and long-term accessibility are also attractive for researchers with limited technical support or financial resources. This workshop therefore approaches sustainability not as a concern that emerges at the end of a project, but as a design principle that can inform TEI workflows from the outset.

Schedule and requirements:

After an introduction to the motivations for this workshop, we will cover the following topics:

• Installing and using Scholarly XML extension for VS Code for authoring and validating TEI.
• Setting up CETEIcean in a simple web page.
• Exploring multimodal examples using additional libraries such as Verovio (MEI) and MathJax (LaTeX), as well as browser-compatible formats such as MathML and SVG.
• Publishing on GitHub pages and Netlify.
• Discussion of sustainability, graceful degradation, and long-term maintenance of TEI publications.
• Show and tell: Participants are invited to present and discuss their own lightweight publishing strategies. We’d love to see your approach!
• Example TEI documents will be provided. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own TEI to work with.
• Participants must bring their own laptop and be able to install (free) software on it. Internet access will be required.

References:

Cayless, Hugh, and Raffaele Viglianti. “CETEIcean: TEI in the Browser.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2018, Washington, DC, July 31 – August 3, 2018. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2018. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 21 (2018). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol21.Cayless01.

Smithies, James, Carina Westling, Anna-Maria Sichani, Pam Mellen, and Arianna Ciula. 2019. “Managing 100 Digital Humanities Projects: Digital Scholarship & Archiving in King’s Digital Lab.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 013 (1).

Viglianti, Raffaele, and Gimena del Rio Riande. 2025. Against infrastructure: global approaches to digital scholarly editing in “Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century” eds. James O’Sullivan et al. Scottish University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.62637/sup.GHST9020.4

Presenters: R. Viglianti, T. Roeder