Design, Development, and Documentation: Hacking TEI for Black Digital Humanities

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a standard of extensible markup language (XML) that prides itself upon the ability to adapt and evolve to the ever-changing needs of its users, who rely on the guidelines for scholarly modeling, analysis, and digital collections. Now in its fifth major iteration (P5), the TEI guidelines are a productive building block for Black digital humanities work. However, close attention to TEI tags, elements, and “best practices” expose how the guidelines relegate Black DH to the margins, as an addendum to or variation on scholarly markup. In this talk, we will share a framework that addresses challenges and tensions Black DH researchers—including librarians, graduate students, and independent scholars—encounter in TEI standards. This framework of critical care and codework grapples with the complexities of transforming historically de-centered voices into data, the politics of labeling the Black body using tags, and the role of encoders in interpreting and annotating Black voices. It also enkindles the design and development of a Black DH Schema for TEI. The Black DH Schema is an anti-racist and anti-colonial effort to reimagine the uses and users of the TEI guidelines and move toward encoding that presumes Blackness and Black people as central to engaging text—whether in discovery, access, analysis, collection, and/or preservation. This talk will share the early progress of this project and a preliminary draft of the tag set. We will further emphasize and discuss the values and principles guiding this project in both process and product, including limning and cultivating collaboration, workflows and timelines, the importance of feminist timekeeping, and critical kindness—from design to comprehensive documentation.