Context: Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2015, UVic, 1-5 June 2015

Material: Material: The complete material for this course is available on GitHub for download and reuse. Functional slides are available here

Course description

This five-day course will provide a hands-on introduction to digital editing practices and tools employing a set of XML-based technologies: The Extensible Markup Language (XML) istself (specifications, Wikipedia.), the XPath data model (specifications, Wikipedia.), the declarative language to transform XML (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, XSLT, specifications, Wikipedia), and finally a specific “dialect” of XML, the Text Encoding Initiative’s TEI P5. The course will cover the process from the original creation of digital files using TEI XML to retrieval of data and publication to the web using XSLT.

We will do so on the basis of late nineteenth-century manuscripts of British diplomatic correspondence from Damascus and the first bi-lingual, English and Arabic, weekly newspaper published in the USA, Kawkab America. Digital images, as well as sample encodings will be provided.

Finally, we will problematise the applicability of the TEI to non-European languages written in non-Latin scripts, particularly Arabic and Ottoman.

No previous programming skills or knowledge of mark-up languages is required, even though previous experiences are an advantage. The course will be adapted to the needs of registered participants.