I recently gave a talk on a panel sponsored by the Digital Arts and Humanities Working Group at The Ohio State University regarding my XML-based composition class, and I thought it worthwhile to post the script here on HASTAC. The talk is largely a synthesis of ideas I've introduced in previous blog entries, hopefully more coherently in this iteration.
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I've taught revision in 28 writing classes, but I've never encountered a medium better suited for it than <oXygen/>, the XML editor that I'm using in my code-based first-year writing class at Ohio State. In most cases, students learn revision as the deletion of a "bad" passage in favor of the addition of a "better" passage, privileging the revised version so much that the previous versions are literally erased. Out of sight, out of mind.
[Cross-posted at juxtasoftware.org]
Every now and then I like to browse the project list at DHCommons.org, just to get an idea of what kind of work is being done in digital scholarship around the world. This really paid off recently, when I stumbled upon Digital Thoreau, an engaging and well-structured site created by a group from SUNY-Geneseo. This project centers around a TEI-encoded edition of Walden, which will, to quote their mission statement, “be enriched by annotations links, images, and social tools that will enable users to create conversations around the text.” I highly recommend that anyone interested in text encoding take a look at their genetic text demo of “Solitude,” visualized using the Versioning Machine.
What really caught my attention, however, is that they freely offer a toolkit of materials from their project, including XML documents marked up in TEI. This allowed me to take a closer look at how they encoded the text featured in the demo, and try visualizing it, myself.
This embed shows the same text featured on the Digital Thoreau site, now visualized in Juxta Commons. It is possible to import a file encoded in TEI Parallel Segmentation directly into Juxta Commons, and the software will immediately break down the file into its constituent witnesses (see this example of their base witness from Princeton) and visualize them as a comparison set.
Once you’ve successfully added the file to your account, you have access to the heat map visualization (where changes are highlighted blue on the chosen base text), the side-by-side option, and a histogram to give you a global view if the differences between the texts in the set. In this way, the Juxta Commons R&D hope to enable the use of our software in concert with other open-source tools.
I should also note that Juxta Commons allows the user to export any other sets they have created as a parallel-segmented file. This is a great feature for starting an edition of your own, but it no way includes the complexity of markup one would see in files generated by a rigorous project like Digital Thoreau. We like to think of it the Parallel Segmentation and new experimental edition builder export as building blocks for future scholarly editions.
Many thanks to the team at Digital Thoreau for allowing us to make use of their scholarship!
I've recently had a series of meetings with the Director of Digital Media Studies (my HASTAC Scholars mentor) and the Director of First-Year Writing at Ohio State, and it looks like I'll be able to teach my first-year writing course next semester as an XML/TEI based class. Below are some of the highlights from the proposal that I wrote up for the occasion.
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Course Proposal: ENGL 1110.01: “Codes” (Spring 2013)
I'm going to be blogging about an initiative here at Northeastern to digitize 19th century Caribbean texts. First: we learn TEI.
Hello, HASTAC Scholars! I’m excited to be included in such a diverse and dynamic group, and I look forward to participating in a year of collaboration, development, and experimentation. In what follows I’ll introduce myself and my research interests and projects. I discovered HASTAC through and decided to apply for its Scholars program because of the work of a Scholar from last year's class, whom I was lucky enough to meet at a conference that she organized this past summer.
Scholars, I need some feedback. Who else is marking up racial elements using TEI?
Power dynamics stemming from race and gender are the basis of my research within 19th century literature, and I've had difficulty with how to mark race, words and phrases that indicate race without referencing it directly, and racial slurs. I am planning to present a paper on this topic, so I would like to hear how other people have addressed these issues.
My name is Tess Habbestad. I am a third year PhD student in the English Department at Texas A&M University. My primary research interest is the intersection of race and gender in Anglophone literature from the end of the long 19th century. My dissertation is going to be a comparative analysis of the portrayal of women of color in interracial relationships in literature set in India, Australia, and the United States.
Julia Flanders: “Small TEI Projects on a Large Scale: TAPAS” -- Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
Note that this Digital Dialogue occurs at a different time than normal (3:30pm).
The TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS) is tackling one of the trickiest problems of scholarly text encoding. How can we provide robust, large-scale TEI publication services, while accommodating the detailed scholarly insight that makes TEI such a valuable tool for the digital humanities? What level of customization and variation can we support without compromising on interoperability, and what are the mechanisms by which we can achieve the optimal balance? And who needs variation anyway–what kinds of scholarly insight are at stake, or at risk?
TAPAS seeks to offer long-term TEI repository and publishing services, with special focus on supporting scholars who lack access to XML publishing infrastructure or expertise at their own institutions. Supported by a planning grant from the IMLS and now by a two-year IMLS National Leadership Grant and an NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant, the TAPAS service will make it possible for scholars to use TEI in their teaching and research without mastering the full suite of XML technologies. The service will also provide access to consulting, training, documentation, and community-developed tools. This talk will explore the conceptual and strategic challenges in developing TAPAS, and in particular the problem of how to harmonize–or transcend–divergent approaches to TEI encoding.
Julia Flanders is the Director of the Women Writers Project, part of the Center for Digital Scholarship in the Brown University Library. She is also editor-in-chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly, an online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal of digital humanities, and has served in a variety of positions within the Text Encoding Initiative, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, centerNet, and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Her research focuses on text encoding, digital methods of scholarly communication, and the politics of labor in the digital academy.
Digital Dialogues is MITH’s signature events program, held almost every week while the academic semester is in session.
Digital Dialogues is an occasion for discussion, presentation, and intellectual exchange that you can build into your weekly schedule. Talks are open to the public, and guests are welcome to bring their lunches.
Visit http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues or contact mith@umd.edu for additional information.
