Between automatic and manual encoding: Towards a generic TEI model for historical prints and manuscripts

International audienceCultural heritage institutions today aim to digitise their collections of prints andmanuscripts (Bermès 2020) and are generating more and more digital images (Gray2009). To enrich these images, many institutions work with standardised formats such asIIIF, preserving as much of the source’s information as possible. To take full advantage oftextual documents, an image alone is not enough. Thanks to automatic text recognitiontechnology, it is now possible to extract images’ content on a large scale. The TEI seemsto provide the perfect format to capture both an image’s formal and textual data (Janèset al. 2021). However, this poses a problem. To ensure compatibility with a range ofuse cases, TEI XML files must guarantee IIIF or RDF exports and therefore must bebased on strict data structures that can be automated. But a rigid structure contradictsthe basic principles of philology, which require maximum flexibility to cope with varioussituations. The solution proposed by the Gallic(orpor)a project1 attempted to deal with such acontradiction, focusing on French historical documents produced between the 15th andthe 18th c. It aims to enrich the digital facsimiles distributed by the French NationalLibrary (BnF)