Over the last decade a great number of letter and correspondence encoding projects have been using TEI. For instance, the DALF: Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders (http://ctb.kantl.be/project/dalf/), The Van Gogh Letters (http://vangoghletters.org/vg/) and others. The Text Encoding Initiative has its own Special Interest Group that develops standards and best-practice guidelines for the encoding of correspondence with TEI (http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/SIG:Correspondence).

When we designed this course, we also worked on a correspondence: The Letters of 1916 project (http://letters1916.maynoothuniversity.ie/) and therefore we wanted to include a section on the encoding example of this genre into this course.

Correspondence specific header elements

For the encoding of correspondence metadata you use essentially the same TEI header as for other texts. However, in addition to the already mentioned elements that can be used in the TEI header, the TEI provides a set of other elements that were specifically designed for the description of correspondence. These are the <correspDesc> element and its child elements.

The <correspDesc> element was introduced to provide further description about the correspondence such as who sent a letter to whom, from where was it sent.

The <correspDesc> element has two child elements, <correspAction> and <correspContext>. The first is used to store a structured description of the place a letter is from, the name of the person that sent a letter and the date it was send or any other action related to the correspondence. The <correspContext> element on the other hand provides references to letters or other correspondence that was sent prior or afterwards and is somehow related to the letter.

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<profileDesc>
         <correspDesc>
            <correspAction type="sent">
               <persName>Major E. Reade</persName>
               <placeName>Dartmoor Prison</placeName>
               <date when="1916-07-05">05 July 1916</date>
            </correspAction>
            <correspAction type="received">
               <persName>Mabel FitzGerald</persName>
               <placeName>Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland</placeName>
               <date>unknown</date>
            </correspAction>
            <correspContext>
               <ref type="prev"
                  target="http://letters1916.maynoothuniversity.ie/explore/letters/942"> 
                 Previous letter from <persName>Major E. Reade</persName> 
                 to <persName>Mabel FitzGerald</persName>: <date>20 June 1916</date>
               </ref>
               <ref type="next"
                  target="http://letters1916.maynoothuniversity.ie/explore/letters/945"> 
                 Next letter of <persName>Major E. Reade</persName> 
                 to <persName>Mabel FitzGerald</persName>: <date>10 July 1916</date>
               </ref>
            </correspContext>
         </correspDesc>
      </profileDesc>

For the transcription of the letter a number of additional elements can be used that are genre specific for the tagging of correspondence features. As we have learned earlier in this course the transcribed text is within the <text> and <body> section of the TEI document. There are specific TEI elements for the encoding of opener, closer and postscripts and they can be nested in the following way:

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<text>
      <body>
         <opener>The opener of the letter goes here</opener>
         <p>The transcription of the letter goes here</p>
         <closer>The closer of the letter goes here</closer>
         <postscript>
            <p> Postscripts (P.S.) goes here</p>
         </postscript>
      </body>
</text>

Within the <opener> address information, the date and the salutation can be encoded using suitable elements such as <address>, <dateline> and <salute>:

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<opener>
    <address>
       <addrLine>H.M.Prison,</addrLine>
       <addrLine>Dartmoor</addrLine>
    </address>
    <dateline>5 July 1916.</dateline>
    <salute>Madam T.D.Fitzgerald</salute>
</opener>

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<closer>
       <salute>I am, Madam, Your obedient Servant,</salute>
       <signed>E. Reade</signed>
       <dateline>Dartmoor, 5 July</dateline>
 </closer>

Between the opener and the closer is the actual message of a letter and this message can be encoded using <p> tag which indicate paragraphs. Further information on how to use the opener, the closer and other relevant tags can be found together with detailed examples in the TEI guidelines. To familiarise yourself with the TEI guidelines, please have a look at the following two sections now:

2.4.6 Correspondence Description. TEI P5 Guidelines. <http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/HD.html#HD44CD>

4.2.2 Openers and Closers. TEI P5 Guidelines. <http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/DS.html#DSOC>

Further reading

Peter Stadler, Marcel Illetschko, and Sabine Seifert. Towards a Model for Encoding Correspondence in the TEI: Developing and Implementing <correspDesc>. Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative. Issue 9. 2016. <http://jtei.revues.org/1433>