Status of the tutorial: in progress
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) works towards guidelines (Sperberg-McQueen & Burnard 1994) for a standardisation of encoding formats for text interchange.
Originally, the TEI Guidelines were implemented in the Standard Generalized Mark Up Language (SGML); later implementations build on the eXtensible Markup Language (XML).
In the TEI Guidelines, an individual text or document is made up of two parts:
A header and the text itself; these two parts can either be stored in a single file or as two separate interlinked or referenced files.
The header contains meta-information about the text such as the author, title, year, edition etc. as well as information about encoding practices etc.
Two devices are employed within header an text: tags and entity references
Texts are assumed to be made up of elements such as chapters, paragraphs, sentences, words etc.