Torsten Roeder

Torsten Roeder works at the University of Wurzburg and is specialized on digital heritage research. His work in digital editing and textual history made him a member of the TEI Technical Council. Recently, he started a Retro Computing Lab at his department which is used for studying the digital culture of the 1980s and 1990s. He also holds a PhD in musicology and plays some guitar, and enjoys gardening. Jack of all trades, master of none.

Events with this speaker

Day 4

11:55

40m

What You Hack Is What You Mean: 35 Years of Wiring Sense into Text

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.