Encoding Pedagogy: Interpreting the Upanishads through Small-Scale Semantic Annotation.

This poster documents a pilot project that treats a TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) schema as a research instrument, not just a delivery format. The question driving it: what can a markup language carry about teaching, and what does it drop? Working from Patrick Olivelle's English translation of two Upanishads, this project built a pedagogical ontology from close reading (thirteen categories, seven carried forward for this pilot), then encoded it as a custom TEI schema (ODD) treating every schema error encountered along the way as data about where the initial reading had been imprecise, not just a bug to fix quietly.