The debates over XML/TEI encoding within digital humanities are in many ways the public expression of digital formalism implicit in digital humanities projects. These can stem from an over-concentration on problems that computation can solve, and the reduction of other projects to this frame. This derives from a tendency to see humanities scholarship through what we might call **the strong-encoding paradigm in digital humanities**, which argues for knowledge representation to be the core activity in the field. Whilst not wishing to diminish the importance of good encoding and markup practice, in the strong-encoding articulation of digital humanities as encoding, everything else is supplementary. In contrast, we argue that weak-encoding is a more pragmatic approach to the importance of encoding more generally, as part of a good practice associated with a balancing of the quality of, and comprehensiveness in, encoding a project. To put this another way, we don’t see the value of making the perfect the enemy of the good within the digital humanities. What is often not acknowledged in this position is the way in which it implies a reconfiguration of a disciplinary constellation of concepts to those drawn from computation, especially a database form of thinking.
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