Digital Mitford Coding School

9:30 - 10:15am

• Introductions/nametags. Internet access working?
• Discussion of projects and interests bringing you all here.
• Digital Mitford intro:
  • Overview of the Project Parts
  • http://digitalmitford.org
  • Project File Management
    • Internal/institutional workspaces
    • Public-facing: GitHub

10:15 - 10:45am

Introduction to text encoding and XML markup

• Orientation to XML elements and attributes. For further reading see Obdurodon’s What is XML and Why should humanists care?
• Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects (OHCO): the XML Tree hierarchy
• Well-formedness vs. Validity
• Character entities: ampersands and angle bracket characters in XML
• Example XML files:
  • Ozymandias files
  • Emily Dickinson project:
    • TEI files for fascicle 16
    • Project website: fascicle 16 poems
• The process of document analysis and document data modeling
• Issues with imposing an ordered hierarchy on messy documents (see Ozymandias example): What do we do with overlapping hierarchies?

10:45am - lunch

TEI XML Orientation

• What is the Text Encoding Initiative? and why work with it?
  • The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form.: The TEI Guidelines
  • The Poughkeepsie Principles (1987/88): coeval with the early development of markup languages: SGML, then XML, HTML in the 1990s
  • Slides from Northeastern U: Overview of Text Encoding and the TEI
  • Interoperability vs. Interchange in sharing data; TEI as an interchange format
• Key concepts for document modeling:
  • Mindful file management
  • Distinguish semantics from display
  • Cross-platform compatibility
  • Long-range sustainability (outlasting changes to software)
• Microsoft Office Word as XML
  • A sample of Microsoft Office’s XML format under the hood
  • Markup: your control of a data model.
• Surveying the TEI in the Mitford project:
  • Modeling our data and metadata: the Digital Mitford Codebook (where we began)
  • documents:
    • 1823-03-25 MRM letter to B. R. Haydon web reading view and TEI document
    • poems: Watlington Hill (TEI)
    • prose fiction: Our Village, Violeting sketch (TEI)
  • Manuscript data curation: The Giant MSS Spreadsheet
  • prosopography (si.xml)
  • interlinking structured data
• Planning a TEI project
  • Guidelines chapters
  • Schemas: encoding project rules (validity)
  • Introduction to ODDs with examples
• Working with TEI in oXygen
  • associated schema lines
  • syntax checking

Lunch Break

1:30pm - 2:30pm

TEI ODD walk-through exercise

• What is an ODD? One Document Does it All: Beginner resources
• An orientation to a TEI project through an ODD file: The Hamilton Project. Hamilton ODD (GitHub repo)
• The Digital Mitford Project ODD (pipeline prep from Site Index and finished file) and Site Index ODD (two documents do it all?)

2:30pm - 5pm

MS Paleography workshop: Mitford letters

• Resources for Learning and Working with TEI for Manuscript Letters
• Prepping a starter template file: do’s and dont’s
• Greg Bondar: on Postmarks and Authentication of manuscript letters (30 mins)
• Letter Encoding with a Guiding Schema: An Exercise</a>
• Resources:
  • Letter images and resources (prepped from our Sharepoint workspace)
  • Digital Mitford’s Guide to 19th-c British Postmarks and How to Code Them In TEI
  • More resources on British Postmarks
  • Prosopography data development and organization (Digital Mitford back lists)
• Data Types and how we work with them: a reference list

5 - 5:30pm

Discussion and review of MS workshop code

• Transforming and publishing intro discussion
• Editions that work with manuscript data: Thoreau, Shelley-Godwin Archive, Frankenstein Variorum
• TEI Guidelines on Representation of Primary Sources - zones and surfaces:

9:30am - 11:30am

Introducing Regular Expressions: patterns in text files

• Perl regular expression patterns in oXygen
  • Resource: NewtFire Autotagging with Regular Expressions tutorial
  • Introductory exercise: Shakespeare's sonnets
  • finding patterns
  • replacing patterns
• From “plain” text to XML: comparing source documents
• Sources of text for up-conversion:
  • Problematic: Internet Archive (Example); Hathi Trust (Example), Google Books
  • Better: Project Gutenberg (created to be shared)
  • Expedient: Literature Online (see text conversion explanation)

Lunch Break

2 - 4:15 pm

• Regular Expressions Workshop: Into the Weeds! Files to Up-convert from the Digital Mitford Project [to be posted]
  • Steps:
    • Perform document analysis: study and look for patterns you can search for. Jot them down
    • Remove everything you don’t need at start and end of document
    • Simplify/reduce white spaces.
    • Work from the inside out: Try starting with what you can match readily and the most numerous line-by-line tags.
    • When working with larger structures (chapters, scenes, speeches, line groups), try the clopen (close-open) strategy. If you find the start of a thing, you have found the end of the previous thing. Remember if you use clopen, you have to clean it up afterwards: you’ll have an extra start-tag at the start and you’ll be missing the end tag at the end.

4:30 - 5:30pm

Introduction to XPath

• Our up-converted file of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in TEI
• Digital Mitford Site Index

9:30 -10am

Wrapping up!

• Last full day: Housekeeping and travel arrangements
• Taking stock: Research questions, project ideas, applications.
• Some options we like for publishing TEI XML editions:
  • TEI Publisher (driven by eXist-db)
  • TAPAS Project
  • Converting TEI into HTML without losing its semantics: CETEIcean

10 - 11:25am

XPath intensive with Digital Mitford Site Index

11:30am - 12:30pm

XQuery or XSLT demonstration: pulling and remixing data

Lunch Break

2 - 3 pm

Document Data Modeling with the Digital Mitford Journal: Discussio

3 - 4:30 pm

9:30am - 12:30pm

Conclusions/Farewells/Last Questions! For those who can stay, hands-on Practice with anything we have introduced in this workshop

2pm onward