{"guid":"ba5269c3-88f7-50e8-b12c-63510ee697e8","title":"What You Hack Is What You Mean: 35 Years of Wiring Sense into Text","subtitle":null,"slug":"39c3-what-you-hack-is-what-you-mean-35-years-of-wiring-sense-into-text","link":"https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/event/detail/what-you-hack-is-what-you-mean-35-years-of-wiring-sense-into-text","description":"Encoding isn’t just for machines — it’s how humans shape meaning. This talk traces 35 years of hacking text through the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a community-driven, open-source standard for describing the deep structure of texts. We’ll explore how TEI turns literature, research, and even hacker lore into machine-readable, remixable data — and how it enables minimal, sustainable self-publishing without gatekeepers. From alphabets to XML and the Hacker Bible, we’ll look at text as a living system: something we can read, write, and hack together.\n\nComputers can’t do much without encoding. They need ways to turn bytes into symbols, words, and meaning — to make text readable for both humans and machines. But encoding isn’t just for machines. Humans also encode: we describe, structure, and translate our thoughts into text. And while the number of text formats seems endless (and keeps growing), that’s not a bug — it’s a feature. Diversity in encoding is how we learn what works and what doesn’t.\n\nLong before ASCII tables or Unicode, text encoding already existed — in alphabets, printing presses, and typographic systems. Every technology of writing has been a way of hacking language into matter: from clay tablets to lead letters, from code pages to Markdown. Each era brings new formats and new constraints — and with them, new genres, new rules, new cultural codes. Think of poetry and protocol manuals, fairy tales and README files, the Hacker Bible itself — all shaped by the tools and conventions that carry them.\n\nSo here’s the question: can we encode not only what we see, but what we mean? Can we capture a poem’s rhythm, a play’s voices, or the alternate endings of a story — and do it in a way that’s open, remixable, and machine-readable?\n\nTurns out, yes — and the solution has existed since 1988. It’s called the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a long-running open-source standard that lets you describe the structure, semantics, and context of texts using XML. You can think of it as a humanities fork of hypertext — an extensible markup language for everything from medieval manuscripts to memes.\n\nTEI is more than a format: it’s a collaborative, living standard maintained by an international community of researchers, librarians, and digital humanists. It evolves with the world — adding elements for new text types (like social media posts) and for changing cultural realities (like non-binary gender markers). It embodies open science principles and keeps publishing in the hands of its creators.\n\nYou don’t need a publisher, a platform, or a big server farm. Just an XML-aware text editor, a few lines of CSS, and maybe a Git repo. From there, you can transform your encoded text into websites, PDFs, e-books — or share it directly in its raw, readable, hackable form. It’s sustainable, transparent, and low-energy. It even challenges the academic prestige economy by making every individual contribution visible — from editors to annotators to script writers.\n\nIn this talk, we’ll look at text as code and code as culture, from alphabets to XML, and explore how TEI can be a tool for hacking not machines but meaning itself. We’ll end with a practical example: a TEI-encoded page of the first Hacker Bible — because our own history also deserves to be archived, shared, and forked.\n\nLicensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0","original_language":"eng","persons":["Torsten Roeder"],"tags":["2258","2025","39c3","Art \u0026 Beauty","Fuse","39c3-eng","39c3-deu","Day 4"],"view_count":1198,"promoted":false,"date":"2025-12-30T11:55:00.000+01:00","release_date":"2025-12-30T00:00:00.000+01:00","updated_at":"2026-04-10T18:15:05.922+02:00","length":2521,"duration":2521,"thumb_url":"https://static.media.ccc.de/media/congress/2025/2258-ba5269c3-88f7-50e8-b12c-63510ee697e8.jpg","poster_url":"https://static.media.ccc.de/media/congress/2025/2258-ba5269c3-88f7-50e8-b12c-63510ee697e8_preview.jpg","timeline_url":"https://static.media.ccc.de/media/congress/2025/2258-ba5269c3-88f7-50e8-b12c-63510ee697e8.timeline.jpg","thumbnails_url":"https://static.media.ccc.de/media/congress/2025/2258-ba5269c3-88f7-50e8-b12c-63510ee697e8.thumbnails.vtt","frontend_link":"https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-what-you-hack-is-what-you-mean-35-years-of-wiring-sense-into-text","url":"https://api.media.ccc.de/public/events/ba5269c3-88f7-50e8-b12c-63510ee697e8","conference_title":"39C3: Power 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