The Adaptive TEI Network: Antiracist, Decolonial, and Inclusive Markup Interventions

This poster presentation introduces the “PhD CoLab” project (University of British Columbia, 2024-26, with the collaboration of the SFU Digital Humanities Innovation Lab, DHIL) which brings together graduate students, faculty, and staff from various fields in humanities, languages, and literatures. While based in Vancouver, an English-speaking North American education system, this multifaceted project is concerned with the continuities and limitations of text encoding across languages (English, Spanish, German and Russian), geographic regions, and literary genres. This poster will provide concrete examples to illustrate the larger objectives of the PhD CoLab.

One of the encompassed projects is NovElla, which focuses on making visible and accessible short prose fiction written by early modern Spanish writers. It includes a catalog of annotated bibliographic resources to help promote future research by both students and scholars. Another example, related to Latin America, is Unión Cívica Project that focuses on the newspaper Unión Cívica published by the eponymous political movement founded in 1961 in the aftermath of the Rafael L. Trujillo dictatorship (1930-1961) in Dominican Republic. We will offer high resolution digital reproductions of 140 issues, with annotations, to provide political and historical context.

Furthermore, the very structure of the Adaptive TEI Network, rooted in a team-oriented ethos, disrupts the traditional mode of solitary, humanistic research. PhD students collaborate in a transdisciplinary team-based, project-oriented environment where we learn from and with one another while we propose a new TEI schema for text-encoding projects that consider antiracist, decolonial, inclusive and feminist markup practices.

In short, the TEI schema aims to address some of the projects’ research questions like: Can we adapt current TEI modules or does an antiracist/decolonial and feminist engagement with the literary text necessitate new TEI markup standards or new modules? Is the TEI also robust enough to address/function for multilingual texts?