For most applications in the Digital Humanities, the Text Encoding Initiative or TEI is the appropriate metadata schema as it allows description and markup at the textual level. In other words, most metadata schemas are designed to describe objects and items for findability in a web application or information structure. TEI does effectively the same thing, but allows depth of description on a more granular level allowing traditional book history and literary analysis work in a digitally accessibly format. TEI allows the user to describe a work at whatever level of specificity that is required for the project. If a project aims to understand aspects of the physical object such as bindery, mise en page, paleographical notes, etc., TEI allows tags to indicate these elements. Similarity, if a project aims to note other instances of the text such as word frequency, typographical notations, marginality (specifically noting the contexts of the marginalia)TEI allows for these as well. Importantly, like all metadata, these aspects are searchable and quantifiable and therefore displayable in a visualization or other graphical output. Additionally, users can develop Python and other operational programs to automate aspects of the entered metadata for dynamic output.
Like all metadata and encoding standards, the documentation is absolutely vital and holds all the answers to common questions. Please make sure to read the documentation (dry as it is) as you look through TEI's possibilities and start to envision your project
