The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has developed over 20 years into a key technology in text-centric humanities disciplines, with an extremely wide range of applications, from diplomatic editions to dictionaries, from prosopography to speech transcription and linguistic analysis. It has been able to achieve its range of use by adopting a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach , by recommending customization to suit particular projects, and by eschewing any attempt to dictate how the digital texts should be rendered or exchanged. However, this flexibility has come at the cost of relatively limited success in interoperability. In our view there is a distinct set of uses (primarily in the area of digitized ‘European’-style books) that would benefit from a prescriptive recipe for digital text; this will sit alongside other domain-specific, constrained TEI customizations, such as the very successful Epidoc in the epigraphic community. TEI-Simple may become a prototype for a new family of constrained customizations. For instance, a TEI Simple MS for manuscript based work could be built on top of the ENRICH project, drawing on many of the lessons and some of the code for TEI Simple.

The TEI has long maintained an introductory subset (TEI Lite), and a constrained customization for use in outsourcing production to commercial vendors (TEI Tite), but both of these permit enormous variation, and have nothing to say about processing. The present project can be viewed in some ways as a revision of TEI Lite, re-examining the basis of the choices therein, focusing it for a more specific area, and adding a "cradle to grave" processing model that associates the TEI Simple schema with explicit and standardized options for displaying and querying texts. This means being able to specify what a programmer should do with particular TEI elements when they are encountered, allowing programmers to build stylesheets that work for everybody and to query a corpus of documents reliably.

This project, TEI Simple, focuses on interoperability, machine generation, and low-cost integration. The TEI architecture facilitates customizations of many kinds; TEI Simple aims to produce a complete 'out of the box' customization which meets the needs of the many users for whom the task of creating a customization is daunting or seems irrelevant. TEI Simple in no way intends to constrain the expressive liberty of encoders who do not think that it is either possible or desirable to follow this path. It does, however, promise to make life easier for those who think there is some virtue in travelling that path as far as it will take you, which for quite a few projects will be far enough. Some users will never feel the need to move beyond it, others will outgrow it, and when they do they will have learned enough to do so.

A major driver for this project is the texts created by phase 1 of the EEBO-TCP project, which were placed in the public domain on 1 January 2015. Another 45,000 texts will join over the following five years, creating by 2020 an archive of 70,000 consistently encoded books published in England from 1475 to 1700, including works of literature, philosophy, politics, religion, geography, science and all other areas of human endeavor. When we compare the query potential of the EEBO TCP texts in their current and quite simple encoding with flat file versions of those text, it is clear that the difference in query potential is very high, especially if you add to that coarse encoding simple forms of linguistic annotation or named entity tagging that can be added in a largely algorithmic fashion. During 2012 and 2013 extensive work has been undertaken at Northwestern, Michigan and Oxford to enrich these texts and bring them into line with the current TEI Guidelines (where necessary working with the TEI to modify the Guidelines). TEI Simple uses this corpus as a point of departure and will provide its users with a friendlier environment for manipulating EEBO texts in various projects. But TEI Simple should not be understood as an EEBO specific project. We believe that, given the extraordinary degree of internal diversity in the EEBO source files, a project that starts from them can, with appropriate modifications, accommodate a wide range of printed texts differing in language, genre, or time and place of origin.