Invitation to join members of the Digital Mitford project team from Wed. June 28 through Friday June 30, 2017 for the Fifth Annual Workshop Series and Coding School, hosted by the Pitt-Greensburg’s Center for the Digital Text.
E-mail your interest by Monday April 3
The Digital Mitford project has two major purposes:
- to produce the first comprehensive scholarly edition of the works and letters of Mary Russell Mitford, and
- to share knowledge of TEI XML and related humanities computing practices with all serious scholars interested in contributing to the project.
Our editing team meets face-to-face to brush up on project methods and make major decisions, and we invite participants and prospective new editors to learn our methods and think with us about project management challenges during the Coding School.
Please join us if you want to learn text encoding methods and their applications in the Digital Humanities in the context of an active digital archive project. We will orient you to our methods of text encoding, edition making, and data analysis by giving you hands-on experience with literary and historical documents. We offer an opportunity to learn and reflect on the encoding of markings on manuscript material, as well as the auto-tagging enormous and complicated texts with regular expression matching.
All participants gain experience with navigating and processing editorial markup helpful in managing a digital edition project. Returning participants and advanced coders will continue learning how to write project schemas and process and transform markup for publication. And we invite all participants to think with us about how best to build a site interface and visualizations to help explore the data we are gathering on nineteenth-century networks of people, places, and texts. Our workshops are held at the lovely Pitt-Greensburg campus, recently named one of the five most scenic college campuses near Pittsburgh.
HOW TO REGISTER:
Send me an e-mail (ebb8@pitt.edu) with the subject line “Digital Mitford Coding School” by Monday, April 3, 2017, indicating your interest in attending the Coding School, whether you are a new learner or a returning registrant, and whether you seek an introduction to coding and markup or the more advanced training we describe here. (All communities are welcome, and learning the backgrounds of our group will help us to prepare training groups.) A registration fee is required of all who are not actively affiliated as editors with the project:
- Students, Adjunct Instructors, or Independent Scholars: $180
- Full-Time Faculty Members, Editors, and Librarians: $300
All registration fees are to be paid by check to the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, and are due by May 15, 2017.
WHAT WE TEACH AND SHARE:
- Discussion of best practices for preparing digital scholarly editions as digital databases.
- Textual scholarship and paleography (working primarily with 19th-century manuscript letters and publications)
- Participation in an active “dig site” for important data on networks of women writers, theaters, and publishers from the 18th and 19th centuries.
- Text encoding, including the following:
- TEI XML encoding and best practices for project sustainability and longevity
- Autotagging and regular expression matching to “up-convert” plain text, and old word-processed documents and dated formats into XML markup,
- Hands-on experience with XPath and code schemas to help manage a project
- For those ready (returning and advanced coders) experience writing XSLT and working with an XML database to publish editions and process data for graphs and charts.
- Perspective on project management and interface development as we work on developing our site interface.
- Individual and Group Instruction, working with our Explanatory Guides and Resources, organized and led by an elected member of the TEI Technical Council. See our instructional materials for a range of coding we are prepared to teach.
WHO COMES?
Though we draw our active editors from researchers of 19th-century literature, we hope that all who join the Mitford project (whatever their primary research field) will find good resources for professional scholarly research and publication, and gain beneficial experience for individual projects. Joining our workshop leads for any interested in joining to a free first-year membership in the Text Encoding Initiative, the international consortium establishing best practices for encoding of digital texts. We anticipate hosting three overlapping groups: 1) beginning coders who wish to learn our methods to apply them to their own projects 2) scholars who wish to join the Mitford project as active editors, and 3) repeat visitors seeking to review what they learned last year and to learn more about how to process, transform, and publish digital editions and informational graphics from markup.
Day 2 of #digimit16: @bcpkr396 has gained a devoted following while teaching us regular expressions @DigitalMitford pic.twitter.com/t1PAQXMyqp
— Alexi Garrett (@AlexiGarrett) June 26, 2016
TIMING
This year’s conference follows the 25th Anniversary of the British Women Writers Conference (BWWC) held in Chapel Hill, NC (June 21-24) , a conference that is very special to us because its 2013 meeting hosted the founding of our Digital Mitford project. Some of our team will be on hand at the BWWC to offer a Digital Paleography workshop at the conference–a preview of what to expect of our more extended Coding School at Greensburg. We expect our resident Coding School participants to arrive at Greensburg on Tuesday June 27 (so we can begin working at around 9am on Wednesday June 28), and depart on Saturday July 1, with our Coding School in session from around 9am Wednesday June 28 through Friday evening June 30. Members of the Digital Mitford editing team plan to use Saturday July 1 as a meeting day, but will also be working together on project development through the week. Some of that activity will feed into material for the Coding School to work with together.