This paper discusses one of the tools which may be used for representing texts in machine-readable form, i.e. encoding systems or markup languages. This discussion is at the same time a report on current tendencies in the field. An attempt is made at reconstructing some of the main conceptions of text lying behind these tendencies. It is argued that, although the conceptions of texts and text structures inherent in these tendencies seem to be misguided, text encoding is nevertheless a fruitful approach to the study of texts. Finally, some conclusions are drawn concerning the relevance of this discussion to themes in text linguistics.My aim in this paper is to show one of the ways in which information technology opens the door to an entirely new approach to text studies. That computing provides us with powerful tools for manipulating and analyzing texts is a well documented fact. My claim, however, is that the use of information technology in textual studies may also help us explicate traditional concepts of text by way of stimulating a new kind of text analysis.If Texts have been studied by many and diverse disciplines -in so-called analytical bibliography (Kraft, 1990, pp. 77-79) or codicology texts are studied as physical objects with physical properties. In classical, medieval, and biblical philology and text criticism the physical objects containing texts are called text witnesses, the text being an abstract entity. In linguistics texts are sometimes regarded as discourse events, sometimes as strings of sentences (de Beaugrande and Dressier, 1981; Halliday and Hasan, 1990).Our concept of text has to alarge extent been shaped by the limits and possibilities of the media which have traditionally carried texts. In this perspective, the computer is a new medium which will create new kinds of texts, i.e. change the subject matter of our study, thus changing also our concepts of and ways of dealing with texts.My main concern here is that adapting our traditional concepts of texts to the use of the new medium may also help us explicate our traditional concepts of texts and give us a better understanding of existing ways of dealing with and relating to texts.This effect becomes particularly clear in attempts to transfer texts from traditional media to the new medium, a process which may be seen as an attempt to represent multi-dimensional texts in a one-dimensional medium.
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