From analogue documents to electronic texts: Introduction to TEI XML editing in multilingual environments

Context: Digital Humanities Institute - Beirut 2015, AUB, 2-6 March 2015

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 the publication of XML files using XSLT. To do so in a meaningful way, each participant will encode a single issue of one of Beirut’s many newspapers covering the restoration of the Ottoman constitution in summer 1908.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.