The 2007 edition of the Manuscript & Electronic Text Academy (META) introduces the fields of text encoding and electronic textual editing to staff of the Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal). The internationally renowned instructors share a wide experience in Textual Editing and Humanities Computing and consist of Dirk Van Hulle (University of Antwerp, B), Edward Vanhoutte and Ron Van den Branden (Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies-CTB, Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, B).

• Tools and Resources
• tei template
• poem.xsl
• METAprose.rnc
• METAprose_doc.html
• METAprose.xml

• Roma: http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/Roma/

• Tuesday session 1
• Tuesday session 2
• Tuesday session 3
• Tuesday session 4

• Wednesday session 1
• Wednesday session 3

• Thursday session 1
• Thursday session 2 XSLT
• Thursday session 2 XPATH

• Lou Burnard, Katherine O'Brien O'Keefe and John Unsworth (eds.), Electronic Textual Editing. New York: MLA.
• Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth (eds.) A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

• Staff of the Universidade de Lisboa interested in acquiring hands-on knowledge on electronic textual editing and text-ecoding with TEI.

• Day 1 (January, 30th): Text, Electronic Textual Editing, Humanities Computing and XML
• Day 2 (Januari, 31st): Text-encoding with TEI
• Day 3 (February, 1st): Addressing, Presenting, and Publishing XML

• Storage media like disks or USB sticks
• Their favourite poem in electronic format
• A one page piece of prose in electronic format

All participants will be provided with all necessary documentation, tools, and software.

Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops.

Computers with pre-installed software and tools will be available at the workshop venue.

Top

Day 1: Electronic Textual Editing, Humanities Computing, and XML [Tuesday 30 January 2007]

The eXtensible Markup Language or XML plays an essential part in creating digital textual objects for publication, conservation, transformation, and research. XML is a metalanguage by which one can create separate markup languages for seperate purposes. It is published as a W3C recommendation, it has rapidly become the standard on the internet, and it is the most widely used standard for markup and exchange of information. As a platform-, software-, and system-independent language, no one 'owns' XML, and it empowers the content provider and facilitates data integration, exchange, maintenance and extraction.

This workshop day will consist of three parts. The first session introduces the workshop and XML. In the second session, Dirk Van Hulle will talk about the hypertextual structure of complex writing processes and demonstrate the importance and usefulness of electronic textual editing. In the third session Dirk will talk about versions and compositional variants. In the fourth session, Edward Vanhoutte will argue that electronic textual editing challenges conventional editorial theory and he will illustrate this with examples from several electronic editions.

Top

Day 2: XML and TEI [Wednesday 31 January 2007]

This workshop day will intruduce the attendees to the problems with electronic texts and will suggest XML as a possible solution to these problems. In four sessions the participants will learn to analyse documents, find suitable markup solutions for their projects, make extensive use of the TEI Guidelines and resources, create valid XML-TEI, and work with open source tools and resources. Course topics include:

• Overview of text encoding
• Overview of markup languages
• Document analysis
• The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
• XML, well formed and valid
• Document Type Definitions (DTD)
• XML Schema
• TEIxLite
• XML for research
• Tools & Resources

Top

Day 3: XSLT [Thursday 1 February 2007]

A crucial factor in the widespread adoption of XML was the development of additional W3C standards for accessing and transforming XML documents. This family of XML-related standards has facilitated the development of software that allows for a fairly low-level publication chain for XML documents. Nowadays, it is perfectly possible to publish XML documents from a personal computer, in a range of publication formats (XHTML, PDF,...), and even integrate them in sophicated interfaces. The Extensible Transformation Language (XSLT) is an essential tool in the toolset of an electronic publisher.

This workshop day will introduce the attendees to technologies and tools to publish their XML documents. The participants will be introduced to the XML Path language (XPath) and Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSLT). In a hands-on session, they will be guided to an on-screen publication of a sample document in the Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) format. Different strategies for publishing XML documents will be illustrated with real-world examples. The module concludes with an open session, dedicated to the particular problems and needs of the participants' projects.

Course topics include:

• Accessing XML: an introduction to XPath
• On-screen display of XML: an introduction to XHTML
• Transforming XML: an introduction to XSLT
• Hands-on development of an XSLT stylesheet
• Different publication strategies
• Overview of real-world examples
• Session open to participants' questions

Top

Ron is a research fellow at the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature in Belgium. He is currently working on a series of projects amongst which the development of the Morkel suite for electronic editions of modern prose, the DALF project which stands for Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders, and TEI by Example featuring freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). With Edward Vanhoutte he is the editor of DALF guidelines for the description and encoding of modern manuscript material. Ron has taught courses in XML and XSLT in Europe and Africa.

email: ron.vandenbranden@kantl.be
URL: http://www.kantl.be/ctb/staff/ron.htm

Top

Edward is director of the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB), the research department of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature. He teaches graduate courses on humanities computing at the University of Antwerp, and is Associate Editor of LLC. The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. His research interests include text-encoding and markup of modern manuscript material, electronic textual editing, scholarly and genetic editing, and the theory and history of humanities computing and electronic textual editing. With Ron van den Branden he is the editor of DALF guidelines for the description and encoding of modern manuscript material. Together with Ron Van den Branden and Melissa Terras, he's currently working on the project TEI by Example featuring freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). Edward has spoken on numerous international conferences and has taught in Europe and Africa.

email: edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be
URL: http://www.edwardvanhoutte.org

Top

Dirk is Associate professor of literature in English at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He is executive editor of the Series of genetic editions of Samuel Beckett's bilingual works and recently completed an electronic genetic edition of Beckett's last works (Brepols Publishers, 2007). He is author of Textual Awareness: A Genetic Study of Late Manuscripts by Joyce, Proust and Mann (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and edited the volume of essays Beckett the European (Journal of Beckett Studies, 2005). He maintains the Beckett Endpage (www.ua.ac.be/beckett) and is currently working with Mark Nixon and Vincent Neyt on a digital manuscript edition of four works by Samuel Beckett.

email: dirk.vanhulle@ua.ac.be
URL: http://www.ua.ac.be/dirk.vanhulle

Top