How to cite this paper

Clérice, Thibault, Hugh Cayless, Jonathan Robie and Ian Scott. “Distributed Text Services 1.0: An API Standard for Publishing and Extending TEI Document Collections.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2026, Washington, DC, August 3 - 7, 2026. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2026. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 31 (2026). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol31.Scott01.

Balisage: The Markup Conference 2026
August 3 - 7, 2026

Balisage Paper: Distributed Text Services 1.0: An API Standard for Publishing and Extending TEI Document Collections

Thibault Clérice

Institut national de recherche en sciences & technologies du numérique

Hugh Cayless

Duke University

Jonathan Robie

Jonathan Robie is a software engineer at Biblica and a researcher at the Nida Institute, focused on AI-assisted biblical scholarship and declarative pipeline systems for linguistic annotation.

Ian Scott

Knowledge Commons, Michigan State University

Abstract

After pouring thousands of hours into marking up collections of documents, many of us face a whole new set of challenges when we are finally ready to share our work. How do we go beyond simply publishing the text for human readers? The first stable release of the Distributed Text Services (DTS) specification offers a blueprint: expose collections of documents through a flexible set of API endpoints, to human and machine clients alike. Though our corpora may differ substantially, we can make our documents findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) by implementing the DTS 1.0 specification in our own APIs. Beyond making collections FAIR, DTS 1.0 implementers can make complex document structures more readily accessible.