, Fuse Language: English
Encoding isn’t just for machines — it’s how humans shape meaning. This talk traces 35 years of hacking text through the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a community-driven, open-source standard for describing the deep structure of texts. We’ll explore how TEI turns literature, research, and even hacker lore into machine-readable, remixable data — and how it enables minimal, sustainable self-publishing without gatekeepers. From alphabets to XML and the Hacker Bible, we’ll look at text as a living system: something we can read, write, and hack together.
Computers can’t do much without encoding. They need ways to turn bytes into symbols, words, and meaning — to make text readable for both humans and machines. But encoding isn’t just for machines. Humans also encode: we describe, structure, and translate our thoughts into text. And while the number of text formats seems endless (and keeps growing), that’s not a bug — it’s a feature. Diversity in encoding is how we learn what works and what doesn’t.
Long before ASCII tables or Unicode, text encoding already existed — in alphabets, printing presses, and typographic systems. Every technology of writing has been a way of hacking language into matter: from clay tablets to lead letters, from code pages to Markdown. Each era brings new formats and new constraints — and with them, new genres, new rules, new cultural codes. Think of poetry and protocol manuals, fairy tales and README files, the Hacker Bible itself — all shaped by the tools and conventions that carry them.
So here’s the question: can we encode not only what we see, but what we mean? Can we capture a poem’s rhythm, a play’s voices, or the alternate endings of a story — and do it in a way that’s open, remixable, and machine-readable?
Turns out, yes — and the solution has existed since 1988. It’s called the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a long-running open-source standard that lets you describe the structure, semantics, and context of texts using XML. You can think of it as a humanities fork of hypertext — an extensible markup language for everything from medieval manuscripts to memes.
TEI is more than a format: it’s a collaborative, living standard maintained by an international community of researchers, librarians, and digital humanists. It evolves with the world — adding elements for new text types (like social media posts) and for changing cultural realities (like non-binary gender markers). It embodies open science principles and keeps publishing in the hands of its creators.
You don’t need a publisher, a platform, or a big server farm. Just an XML-aware text editor, a few lines of CSS, and maybe a Git repo. From there, you can transform your encoded text into websites, PDFs, e-books — or share it directly in its raw, readable, hackable form. It’s sustainable, transparent, and low-energy. It even challenges the academic prestige economy by making every individual contribution visible — from editors to annotators to script writers.
In this talk, we’ll look at text as code and code as culture, from alphabets to XML, and explore how TEI can be a tool for hacking not machines but meaning itself. We’ll end with a practical example: a TEI-encoded page of the first Hacker Bible — because our own history also deserves to be archived, shared, and forked.
Torsten Roeder works at the University of Wurzburg and is specialized on digital heritage research. His work in digital editing and textual history made him a member of the TEI Technical Council. Recently, he started a Retro Computing Lab at his department which is used for studying the digital culture of the 1980s and 1990s. He also holds a PhD in musicology and plays some guitar, and enjoys gardening. Jack of all trades, master of none.