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PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP

XML/TEI Workshop
Learn How to Encode Documents and 
Contribute to the Wesley Works Digital Edition
Andrew Keck, Southern Methodist University
Michelle M. Taylor, University of South Florida

ABSTR AC T: In this session, in many ways a follow-up to last year’s 
Atla session “Proposing a TEI-Encoding Project for the Wesley 
Works,” we introduced participants to the principles of text encod-
ing with XML/TEI. While last year we discussed the rationale for 
using TEI to create a digital version of the Bicentennial Edition of the 
Works of John Wesley, as well as our plans for orchestrating such a 
large-scale project, this year we will offer introductory, hands-on 
training in TEI. Workshop participants will begin with the basics 
of text encoding common to any TEI project, then move on to a 
description of how the Wesley Works Digital Edition, specifically, has 
adopted and adapted these principles to meet its goal of creating 
a digital version of the Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John 
Wesley.

Our workshop was divided into three parts: 

1) An introduction to the basic rules of eXtensible Markup 
Language (XML);

2) An introduction to the Text-Encoding Initiative (TEI), the 
species of XML developed for encoding literary and historical 
texts; and 



Pre-Conference Workshop  9

3)	 An	overview	of	how	documents	(specifically,	letters)	are	
encoded in XML/TEI for inclusion in the Wesley Works Digital 
Edition. 

While	the	first	and	second	portions	of	the	workshop	were	routine	
XML/TEI	training,	the	third	and	final	portion	was	unique	to	Atla	this	
year. This part was the result of almost a year’s worth of develop-
ments in assessing encoding needs for Wesley’s letters and begin-
ning the encoding process, as we began with that genre and will be 
working on the volumes containing his correspondence for the next 
two to three years. While time limitations prevented our ability to 
go into as great an amount of detail as we preferred, we were able 
to go over both the main things one tags in a Wesley letter and the 
step-by-step process for tagging one. We outline these below.

WHAT WE TAG WHEN WE TAG A WESLEY LETTER

People (<persName> tag):
• The correspondent
• Anyone else referred to by name in the letter
• Anyone referred to in editorial notes

Places (<placeName> tag):
• The location from which the letter was posted
• Any other town/city or country mentioned in the letter
• Universities and colleges mentioned in the letter (e.g., Trinity 

College, Cambridge)
• Any other important named landmarks, whether residential 

or institutional (houses/estates, etc.)

Texts (various tags used):
Bible verses and bibliographic references to works both inside 
and outside the Wesley cannon.

Themes (<seg> tag):
Recurring themes; a more interpretive way to tag.



10  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

HOW TO CODE A WESLEY LETTER STEP BY STEP

1) Open	XML	file	containing letter template.

2) Open PDF containing the letter you want to encode (I have 
isolated a single letter).

3) Fill in TEI Header.

4) Fill in body of the letter by copying and pasting letter text, 
paragraph by paragraph, into your template.

5) You may choose to encode footnotes, page breaks, etc. at this 
point or at the end, whichever you prefer.

6) Add tags to all people and places (think proper nouns), using 
Excel spreadsheet to identify @xml:id for each person. NOTE: 
You can only use an @xml:id once per document, though you 
should use a <persName> element at each occurrence of the 
name.

At the conclusion of our workshop, we gave participants a link 
to a survey on Google Forms where they could indicate interest in 
participating in the Wesley Works beginning in Fall 2021.


