What is TAPAS?

TAPAS (the TEI Archiving Publishing and Access Service) provides TEI-based projects a platform for organizing and publishing their encoded texts. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a well-established XML standard used for the representation of texts in digital form, primarily in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Scholars who create digital editions of texts using TEI can use TAPAS to archive, organize, and publish their texts. Teachers can also use TAPAS as an easy platform for displaying TEI files in the classroom, enabling students to experiment with TEI encoding and publication.

TAPAS provides long-term data curation for TEI data. TEI files are displayed for reading through an interface that offers a growing variety of viewing options (through a varied set of XSLT stylesheets) that support diplomatic and normalized views of the text. Future versions of TAPAS will also offer distant reading and visualization options. While TAPAS does not enable users to directly upload XSLT or CSS, the framework for adding viewing options is open to collaborative contribution; contact us to find out more.

TAPAS is free to all users. Users can upload TEI/XML files to TAPAS and publish them using the TAPAS reading interface. They can also create more complex TAPAS projects with multiple collections, including page images, personographies, and other related files. They can also invite collaborators to contribute to collections of TEI materials.

Find out more about how to get started with TAPAS on our Getting Started page.