SIG:Correspondence

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Introduction

The TEI Special Interest Group on Correspondence seeks to bring together scholars interested in creating digital scholarly editions of correspondence. The goal of the SIG will be to discuss and develop sample tagsets (including suggesting additions/modifications to the TEI Guidelines) for varying forms of correspondence as well as to create tutorials and best practice models.

Because the initiative for this SIG emerged from editorial work with 19th century letters, the organizers of this SIG have focused on these types of materials. However, we want this SIG to be more encompassing, embracing varying types of historical and literary correspondence including epistles, telegrams, postcards, etc., and perhaps other types of documents that share features with physical written correspondence like diaries, diary entries, letters to the editor, e-mail, blogs, etc. The common feature of these sorts of text is a generally formalized physical appearance (e.g., an envelope for letters) and structure of content (i.e. address field, special formulas for opener and closer).

Mailing List

The SIG runs a mailing list, which you can join by visiting https://lists.psu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TEI-CORRESP-SIG&A=1. Public mailing list archive: https://lists.psu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=TEI-CORRESP-SIG.

"Encoding Correspondence. A Manual for Encoding Letters and Postcards in TEI-XML and DTABf"

The handbook "Encoding Correspondence. A Manual for Encoding Letters and Postcards in TEI-XML and DTABf" is now published with a first set of articles open access in version 1. It is edited by Stefan Dumont, Susanne Haaf, and Sabine Seifert.

More articles are coming soon, the community has the possibility to review and comment. After the public peer review phase (until April 30, 2020), the articles will be revised and updated, and the handbook will be published in version 2. All articles of version 1 remain online and citable.

Although the TEI Guidelines contain suggestions for the encoding of correspondence materials, there are still open questions on how to deal with several structural and textual occurrences. This handbook shall help editors of digital editions and projects to encode letters and postcards in TEI-XML and DTABf. Topics of discussion are, amongst others, problems with <opener> and <closer>, with postscripts, letterheads, and the expansion of the exchange format CMIF.

The handbook summarizes the discussions and solutions of the workshop "Challenges of Correspondence Encoding" that was held by the TEI Correspondence SIG and CLARIN-D at the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in October 2018. The project was also presented at the TEI Conference 2019 in Graz (abstract, slides).

The handbook can be downloaded from GitHub. The bibliographic information of the articles and cited literature are available at the Zotero group Encoding Correspondence.

Bibliography of Digital Correspondence Projects

For a bibliography of TEI-based and non-TEI-based digital correspondence projects, databases and digital scholary editions see our Zotero Group "Digital Correspondence Projects".

The Zotero Group Library is divided in three collections:

  • Digital Scholarly Editions
  • Databases (i.e. all digital editions that do not contain full text but only references)
  • Projects (i.e. correspondence projects that have not yet been published or anything else that does not fit the other two collections)

Furthermore, we have introduced a number of tags to search the Zotero Group for digital publications that meet certain criteria - for example, all TEI-based editions (tag: "TEI-XML") that provide their data (tag: "Data available") under a free license (e.g. tag "CC BY").

Activities

Topics currently under discussion

Regarding meta data in <teiHeader> and/or transcription in <text>:

  • handling of envelopes and postal addresses (addresses different in different parts of the world, could this be handled more adequately than just with datelines?)
  • how to deal with enclosures/attachments
  • pre-printed text, e.g. letterhead, postcard captions

Regarding transcriptional part in <text>:

  • content model of opener/closer and their connection with salute, signed, dateline, etc.
  • <salute> (in <opener> and <closer>) with restriction, e.g. it is not allowed within

  • definition of <signed> does not correspond with its actual use in the P5 guidelines
  • content model of <postscript>: look at the Collection of Postscript-Examples and the contributions to the ps-discussion.
  • address now in

    but not in <div>: maybe not a good idea

Further future plans

  • stylesheet for ‘converting’ <correspDesc> to Correspondence Metadata Interchange format
  • provide best-practice model for <text> part
  • provide stylesheets for extracting all <correspDesc> elements from a corpus
  • taxonomy/thesaurus as a suggestion

GitHub repository

There is a GitHub repository for the SIG Correspondence for
a) the element <correspDesc> (encoding examples, documentation on its development etc.), and
b) the Correspondence Metadata Interchange format (CMIF, encoding examples etc.).


Meetings

Zoom, Nov 5, 2025

Attendees

  • Co-Conveners Sabine Seifert & Stefan Dumont
  • 4 attendees

Agenda

Retrospective on correspondence-related presentations at the TEI Conference 2025 in Krakow

  • cf. Book of Abstracts
  • Encoding Complexity - TEI Modeling in the 'Forschungsportal BACH' Project / N. Quenouille (https://zenodo.org/records/17177851)
  • LEGOstyle. Building modular, flexible Editions with TEI / T. Kollatz: https://adwmainz.pages.gitlab.rlp.net/digicademy/bkd/bkd-presentations/TEI2025_LEGO
  • Beyond Rule-Based Processing: LLM-Assisted TEI Encoding of Editorial Interventions in Historical Correspondence / S. Strutz, M. Scholger, G. Vogeler
  • Exploring correspSearch v3 as a Service for Minimal Editions of Correspondence / S. Dumont, S. Grabsch, J. Müller-Laackman, R. Sander, S. Sobkowski (https://zenodo.org/records/17157218)
  • The CMIFerator, a generalised pipeline for contributing to correspSearch / J. Jarosch
  • Editing Multilingual Grand Vizierial Correspondence in TEI. The GraViz project / Y. Yilmaz, S. Kurz, M. Vogelsberger, N. Saeedi, D. Grigoriou (Poster, https://zenodo.org/records/17144225)
  • FAIR research data from Goethe’s inbox: The first 2,400 incoming letters as TEI-XML full texts / C. Thomas, K. Hofmann-Polster, C. Häfner (Poster)

Correspondence-related issues in GitHub TEI

  • Encoding of pre-printed parts in correspondence #2458
    • → we should comment and remind to address this ticket
    • → Buber Correspondence Guidelines on pre-printed parts
  • <address> should become member of att.typed #2459
    • → Perhaps we could restart the discussion here, or better yet, bring it to a conclusion
    • After TEI SIG meeting, the Council decided how to proceed, the issue has now “Status: Go”
  • Testing of encoding of letterheads with <fw> (see Ticket #2457)
    • → Has somebody tested <fw> in the meantime?
    • example helpful, TK will provide some
    • only some changes/additions in prose of Guidelines needed

Further developments in CMIF / correspSearch

  • CT: Are letters of EMLO integrated in correspSearch?
    • → SD: Unfortunately not, EMLO has no API or data dumps yet for the correspondence meta data (and no data in CMIF).
  • CT: Gender information received via GND, Wikidata or the individual projects, what is aimed at? SD: Where to put it, if at all, in correspDesc/CMIF?
    • → `@s`/`@gender` attributes with <persName> should do?
    • → CT: NO! both only allowed with elements actor, person, personGrp, persona, role, which makes sense: you do not want to express that a certain persName has a certain s'ex and/or gender, but the person carrying that name. But adding <person> (and <personGrp>) to CMIF/correspDesc is a good idea anyway?
    • → SD: I would be cautious about that, as it would greatly inflate the CMIF format. However, I also see the need for a solution...
  • TK: We need a place where to put information on updates in CMIF (how often: monthly/weekly etc., last update..) https://github.com/TEI-Correspondence-SIG/CMIF/issues/46
    • SD: Possible to state former editions of a letter (if they are in correspSearch)
  • CT: Integration of full texts / notes, projects should be able to indicate via xPath information where is the full text, where are notes of author, notes of editor etc. (mentioned by Peter Boot).
    • → SD: Extracting letter text and commentary actually works quite well with TEI-XML. I would be more in favor of suggesting to the TEI that the coding of editor commentary be standardized.
  • CT: Make a single letter addressable in correspSearch via link.
    • → SD: That will be possible with csRegistry
  • CT: Visualization of places of sending and receiving is very nice (e.g. not available in ehd)

Zoom, Dec 4, 2024

Zoom: https://uni-potsdam.zoom-x.de/j/67299027160 (Password: 41990745)

Agenda

  • Organisational matters: Further meetings and when they take place, how often etc.
  • News:
  • GiHub-Issues concerning correspondence problems in TEI Guidelines
    • Testing of encoding of letterheads with <fw> (see Ticket #2457)
  • CMIF v1.1 / v2 development
  • ...

Paderborn, Sept 6, 2023

Attendees

  • co-convener Stefan Dumont
  • co-convener Sabine Seifert
  • 16 attendees

Encoding Correspondence Manual and current GitHub-Issues

Panel “Materiality in editions of 20th-century paperbound correspondence” at #teimec2023

  • Lecture on pre-printed materials (telegrams etc.), poems, stamps and semantics concerned
  • Underlying topic: Does it make sense to think about ontologies for correspondence, e.g. handwritten, typed? Is there anything we can refer to?

CMIF v2 (Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format)

Correspondence-related talks and posters at #teimec2023

Further discussion

  • Laura Weakly:
    • correspAction - how to deal with censors and censoring
    • written and sent are two different things


Newcastle, Sept 13, 2022

Attendees

  • co-convener Sabine Seifert
  • 9 attendees

Encoding Correspondence Manual

  • short introduction to “Encoding Correspondence Manual” https://encoding-correspondence.bbaw.de/
  • intended as a guide for typical questions and challenges while encoding correspondence
  • review process still ongoing, i.e. e.g. the Hypothes.is comment function still available (= ignore the given dates for deadlines 31 July 2021/30 May 2020)
  • we editors will resume working on the manual as soon as possible; the initial group of editors (Sabine, Stefan, Susanne) is stable
  • question of strategy:
    • review and update papers (=version 2) and after that open github-issues for TEI council, but then reworking of papers needed (=version 3)
    • or leave version 1 as it is, review comments and open github-issues and update papers after implementation in the Guidelines
    • but also others may open issues (ideally referring to the manual) on TEI-GitHub if they wish to see aspects handled rather sooner than later

CMIF (Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format)

  • Stefan worked on Version 1.1 of the CMIF
  • slightly improved schema, also using Schematron
  • provides more feedback for the user
  • Stefan will soon start working on Version 2 of the CMIF
  • will produce an ODD and schema, including feedback to the paper on the CMIF in the manual

correspSearch

  • short introduction to web service correspSearch https://correspsearch.net/en/home.html
  • developed by SIG co-convener Stefan
  • search within metadata of diverse scholarly editions of letters possible, printed or digital
  • search for sender, addressee, as well as place and date of the letter's creation
  • web service assembles and analyzes files in the Correspondence Metadata Interchange (CMI) format which is based on the TEI extension "correspDesc" developed by the TEI Correspondence SIG.
  • currently more than 177.000 letters, with up to 12.000 identified persons

Micro Grants

  • TEI Correspondence SIG and web service correspSearch plan to offer 2 Micro Grants in the amount of 450€ each for students and Phd candidates from Central and Eastern Europe, esp. from Ukraine
  • financed by Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity 2018 für correspDesc, CMIF & correspSearch
  • the result is supposed to be a CMIF file with correspondence metadata to be incorporated in correspSearch and a citable publication at e.g. Zenodo


For minutes of further meetings, see page Past Meetings.

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