One of the digital tools used in the Walt Whitman archive is TEI to store the text into structured data. TEI provides guidelines for organizing digital texts using XML and used to organize texts into document trees. The entire document is known as the root element with additional features like chapters, pages, paragraphs and more. Instead of storing poems and long paragraphs in just plain text, TEI represents a given piece of text as poems and their lines, or paragraphs and sections or account for text variations.
The Whitman archive uses TEI based encoding to organize Whitman’s writings and manuscripts with information such dates, structures, and revisions. This makes it easier to search, preserve, and have access to more information than just the particular text. TEI allows researches to perform advanced searches and study because it provides way to analyze relationships between texts.
While literature is one of the biggest uses of TEI, this tool can also be used in other DH disciplines such as history, linguistics, musical studies, and journalism. TEI can be applied to any field that requires organization of written text like historical documents and journalistic writings. This allows us to analyze everything beyond just the surface level, allowing us to understand patterns, and relationships which we cannot in just traditional close reading.