An Introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative
(From Primary Sources to Publications)
Convenor: Giles Bergel
Lead Trainers: Magdalena Turska and Wolfgang Meier
Hashtag: #TEI and #DHOxSS
Computers: Please bring your own laptop (no tablets please)
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Abstract
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This workshop combines practical sessions with case-studies introducing the use of the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), with a focus on the representation and publishing of primary sources. It will introduce the latest version of the TEI P5 Guidelines through example, showcasing a number of projects in the fields of digital editing, text-analysis and publication. Case studies will include manuscripts, early printed texts and inscriptions, covering both specific textual phenomena and those common to diverse media and genres. Core aspects of TEI to be covered in the hands-on exercise sessions include structural elements of texts; metadata; representing people, places, dates and groups; the transcription and description of documents; encoding correspondence; epigraphy, typography and palaeography in TEI; the customisation of the TEI schema; and how to query, transform and publish your texts. Particular emphasis will be placed on the practical use of TEI for primary sources, many of them taken from historic Oxford collections.
No previous experience with markup, XML, TEI, or editing is assumed. Participants will leave with a grounding based on practical experience in what the TEI can do to represent both the physical and the linguistic features of documents; how it can inform the analysis of texts; and how it can form part of a publication pathway.
Convenor
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Giles Bergel is a digital humanist and book historian based in the Department of Engineering Sciences at the University of Oxford. His work in TEI includes a multi-version edition of the ballad The Wandering Jew’s Chronicle (wjc.bodleian.ox.ac.uk) and an edition of the Stationers’ Register, a primary source for British copyright history. Outside of TEI his interests include computer vision, the study of printing and the history of the British book trades.
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"This was a well-run workshop directed towards a very diverse audience with different expectations and levels of experience. The approach was clear and accessible."
DHOxSS 2017 participant
Link to overview of the week's timetable including evening events.
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Monday 2nd July (Introduction to markup and the TEI)
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08:15-09:30
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Registration (Sloane Robinson building)
Tea and coffee (ARCO building)
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09:30-10:30
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Opening Keynote (Sloan Robinson O'Reilly lecture theatre)
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10:30-11:00
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Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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11:00-12:30
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What is markup? What is XML? Who and what is the TEI?
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(Giles Bergel and Alex Dutton)
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12:30-14:00
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Lunch (Dining Hall)
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14:00-16:00
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Exercises: creating and editing TEI documents with Oxygen
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(Giles Bergel and Alex Dutton)
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16:00-16:30
Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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16:30-17:30
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Encoding primary source documents (Weston Library)
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This session will take place in the Bahari Room at the Weston Library. Please assemble at the ARCO Building by 16.20 where Giles Bergel will meet you to take you to the Weston Library.
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Tuesday 3rd July (Understanding TEI building blocks)
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09:00-10:30
TEI metadata
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(Magdalena Turska and Wolfgang Meier)
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10.30-11:00
Refreshment break (ARCO building)
11:00-13:00
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Names, dates, people and places in TEI; Exercise: 'Ographies
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(Magdalena Turska and Wolfgang Meier)
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13:00-14:30
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Lunch (Dining Hall)
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14:30-15:30
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Case study: Bodleian Student Editions
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(Olivia Thompson and Helen Brown)
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15:30-16:00
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Refreshment break (ARCO building)
16:00 - 17:30
Lectures (various venues)
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Wednesday 4th July (TEI for primary sources -1)
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09:00-10:30
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Describing primary sources
(Matthew Holford)
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10.30 -11:00
Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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11:00-13:00
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Encoding primary sources
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(Matthew Holford)
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13:00-14:30
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Lunch (Dining Hall)
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14:30 - 15:30
Case study
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Digital edition 'Letters and Texts’: Intellectual Berlin around 1800 (Sabine Seifert)
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15:30-16:00
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Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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16:00-17:00
Lectures (various venues)
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Thursday 5th July (TEI for primary sources -2)
09:00-10:30
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TEI for Correspondence
(Sabine Seifert)
10.30-11:00
Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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11:00-13:00
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Exercise
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Editing TEI correspondence, and Correspondence Interchange (Sabine Seifert)
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13:00-14:30
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Lunch (Dining Hall)
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14:30 - 15:30
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Case study
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ISicily: EpiDoc and online publication of epigraphic texts from ancient Sicily (Tuuli Ahlholm)
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15:30-16:00
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Refreshment break (ARCO building)
16:00-17:00
Lectures (various venues)
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Friday 6th July (Publishing with TEI)
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09:00-10:30
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Querying TEI with XPath
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(Magdalena Turska and Wolfgang Meier)
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10.30-11:00
Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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11:00-13:00
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TEI Publisher; TEI: between best practice and practical considerations
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(Magdalena Turska and Wolfgang Meier)
13:00-14:00
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Lunch (Dining Hall)
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14:00-15:00
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Case study
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Encoding Early Modern English Drama (EMED): practice and teaching (Lizzy Williamson)
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15:00-16:00
Closing plenary (O'Reilly lecture theatre)
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Speaker biographies
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Tuuli Ahlholm is an Ancient History doctorate student at University College, Oxford, whose research centres on the social and intellectual history of imperial Rome, especially through epigraphic sources. She also holds a Masters level diploma from International Heritage Visualisation from Glasgow School of Art and continues to foster an interest for digital applications that can facilitate and advance academic research into the Greco-Roman past. Currently, she is working as a research assistant for Jonathan Prag’s ‘ISicily’-project, which aims to create and make freely available online the complete corpus of the c. 3200 inscriptions from ancient Sicily.
Helen Brown is a third year DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, based in the Faculty of English. Her research concerns the application of digital editorial and analytical methods to Alexander Pope’s correspondence. Alongside her studies, Helen is a Digital Editorial Assistant at Oxford University Press, working on projects such as Oxford Scholarly Editions Online and the Very Short Introductions series.
Alex Dutton is a data pipeline developer for the Democratic Commons at mySociety, a civic tech charity that helps citizens demand better. Before this he was the Linked Open Data Architect at the University of Oxford's IT Services. He has a strong background in data and document manipulation, XML, XSLT, RDF and other linked data topics.
Matthew Holford is the curator of the medieval manuscripts catalogue at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. He has worked with TEI since 2011, first on a digital edition of medieval English inquisitions post mortem (www.inquisitionspostmortem.ac.uk) and currently on the ongoing catalogue Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries (http://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk).
Wolfgang Meier is the founder and lead developer of the eXistdb open source project and director of eXist Solutions GmbH, which was created by community members to better support professional users of eXistdb. Besides working on eXistdb since 16 years, he has developed a number of related tools, including for example TEI Publisher, an implementation of the TEI Processing Model. He has contributed to a large number of international academic and commercial projects during the past years.
Sabine Seifert is a research associate at the Theodor Fontane Archive at Potsdam University. She contributed to the development of the digital edition “Letters and texts. Intellectual Berlin around 1800” (http://www.berliner-intellektuelle.eu/?en) at Humboldt University Berlin. Sabine completed an MA in German Literature as well as English literature, and received her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin in 2017 with a study on the history of philology in the 19th century. Since 2014, she has been co-convener of the TEI Special Interest Group Correspondence.
Olivia Thompson is a DPhil candidate in Ancient History at Balliol College, Oxford. Her thesis focuses on changing notions of physical and intellectual property during and after the civil wars of the late Roman Republic. She is more broadly interested in the history of classical scholarship and ways in which digital research tools can be used to reconceptualise ancient sources (in particular, the correspondence of Cicero) and their editorial tradition.
Magdalena Turska is a software developer at eXist Solutions and an elected member of the TEI Consortium’s Technical Council. She has recently completed her DiXiT Marie Curie experienced researcher fellowship at IT Services, University of Oxford where she was a member of the TEI Simple project and one of the authors of the TEI Processing Model. She was a co-editor of the Corpus Ioannes Dantiscus’ Texts and Correspondence. She teaches advanced TEI encoding, XSLT and XQuery and often helps projects with data modeling and application design.
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Lizzy Williamson is a Research Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Exeter. Her research sits at the intersection between early modern literature, historical enquiry, archival studies and the Digital Humanities. In addition to textual scholarship and digital publication, her interests include early modern archives and epistolary culture, especially in a diplomatic and governmental context. Before joining Exeter she edited and encoded documentary editions of non-Shakespearean plays for A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
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