The handbook “Encoding Correspondence. A Manual for Encoding Letters and Postcards in TEI-XML and DTABf” is now online with a first set of articles: https://encoding-correspondence.bbaw.de.

More articles are coming soon. 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: https://graz-2019.tei-c.org/files/BoATEI2019.pdf#page=84, slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oZCDWOQa2DMjpNPVnI_oIe6Z85LVfIka/view).

Editors Stefan Dumont, Susanne Haaf, and Sabine Seifert invite the community to review and give feedback. You can use the annotation tool Hypothes.is (https://web.hypothes.is/) that is integrated in the webpage and allows to comment text passages. After the public peer review phase that ends 30 April 2020, the articles will be revised and published in version 2 of the handbook. All articles of version 1 remain online and citable.

The editors and authors of the handbook are looking forward to your feedback!

The handbook is published under the Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0 and can be downloaded from GitHub, including all TEI files. The bibliographic information of the articles and cited literature are available at the Zotero group “Encoding Correspondence” (https://www.zotero.org/groups/2248469/encoding_correspondence).