Daejeon, July 27–31
The last decades have seen the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) become the cornerstone for digital text encoding in the humanities. With its flexible, extensible guidelines (TEI P5 Guidelines) and robust community support, TEI has facilitated the creation of countless scholarly digital editions. However, as the scale and diversity of TEI-based projects have increased, so too have the challenges associated with maintaining open, sustainable, and above all, reproducible workflows. The reproducibility of digital scholarly work is a crucial yet frequently underestimated aspect, impacting not only the longevity and trustworthiness of individual projects, but also the capacity of the wider community to verify, reuse, and build upon existing research outputs.
This poster presents a new framework designed to address the reproducibility challenges inherent in TEI/XML-based workflows, drawing on practical experience from a research institute specializing in the production of scholarly editions of pre-modern Sanskrit and Tibetan texts. The framework, provisionally titled the Vienna Encoding Guidelines for Editing Sanskrit Texts (VEGEST), proposes a holistic approach that integrates open documentation, modular schema development (VEGEST schemas), and a reproducible software toolchain (VEGEST library). The aim is to support a heterogeneous range of editorial projects, from small individual endeavors to large-scale collaborative editions, while ensuring that both the encoded texts and the processes used to create and transform them remain transparent, verifiable, and adaptable far into the future.
At the heart of this approach is the recognition that TEI projects typically involve both normative and descriptive components: machine-actionable rules encoded in schemas and human-readable documentation that explains and justifies encoding choices. While the TEI P5 Guidelines themselves, as well as influential derived frameworks like EpiDoc (EpiDoc Guidelines, Elliott, Au, et al. 2008–), provide models for combining these elements—often using the ODD (“One Document Does it all”) specification—the reproducibility of the complete workflow, from source text to final output, is usually compromised by factors such as non-standardized software installation, lack of version control for dependencies, and the use of proprietary tools. These issues can render even well-documented projects irreproducible when revisited years later or transferred to different computational environments.
The VEGEST framework addresses these concerns in several ways. First, it adopts standard TEI models by using a modular ODD-based structure that allows for the inheritance and extension of TEI schemas. Documentation and schema files are tracked alongside each other in version control systems, increasing the chances that both the rationale and the rules for encoding remain accessible. Second, and crucially, the framework incorporates a reproducible software environment based on GNU Guix (GNU Guix Developers 2025: 1), a functional package manager capable of specifying and replicating entire computational environments down to the level of compiled programs. By providing recipes and manifests that describe precisely which tools and libraries are required for each transformation step—whether validating XML, transforming documents with XSLT, or generating PDFs with TEX-based systems—the framework ensures that future researchers can reproduce results even as operating systems and software ecosystems evolve.
To illustrate the practical impact of this approach, the poster presents non-trivial examples from actual editorial workflows:
Each of these tasks, often sources of hidden complexity in traditional workflows, is made explicit and replicable through the combined use of versioned ODD documents and the Guix-based software environment.
Beyond the technical details, the framework is situated within the broader context of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable, see Wilkinson et al. 2016) and FAIR4RS (FAIR for Research Software, see Barker et al. 2022; FAIR4RS) principles, which have become increasingly important touchstones for open and sustainable research in the humanities (see, e.g., Creamer et al. 2021; Tello et al. 2024). By foregrounding reproducibility, openness, and modularity, VEGEST not only advances these principles for TEI-based projects but also offers a transferable model for other domains grappling with similar challenges. The poster concludes by reflecting on the benefits and limitations of the approach, and invites discussion on the future of reproducible digital editing, the potential for broader community adoption, and the ongoing evolution of open research infrastructures in textual scholarship.