I was recently looking for a good article on Text Encoding in the Humanities and found this article written by Allen H Renear. It is a good introduction to Text Encoding and posits a excellent argument on why it is important.
This chapter will provide a general orientation to some of the historical and theoretical context needed for understanding both contemporary text encoding practices and the various ongoing debates that surround those practices. We will be focusing for the most part, although not exclusively, on “markup”, as markup-related techniques and systems not only dominate practical encoding activity, but are also at the center of most of the theoretical debates about text encoding (link)
Cite as: A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
