2014 Charleston Library Conference

Comic Book Markup Language (CBML) is an XML vocabulary created by John Walsh at the University of Indiana. Based on Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines, CBML extends the core TEI tag set to enable representations of comic book and graphic novel as documents. It also offers ways to describe their unique structural and content features including panels, panel groups, captions, balloons, and sound effects.

This session will provide an overview of issues in representing comic books in collections and explore solutions offered by CBML’s custom and inherited TEI tags. Examples of marked up documents will be included, and audience participation solicited in marking up further examples. The session will also examine the use of CBML by academic libraries with large comics collections and explore the interoperability of CBML with the Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE).