Encoding Historical Financial Records: With Trees or Graphs?

Abstract

　Tree structures are of vital importance, in the history of mankind, in the structuring of information. The Text Encoding Initiative is no exception that depends on tree structures. However, with the recent rise of graph-based information structuring methods, some practitioners of the TEI have directed toward graph-based text encoding, such as the development of <standOff> markup. This paper discusses graphbased structuring of textual types that are difficult to understand structurally with trees, using historical accounting documents as an example.