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HUMANITIES COMPUTING: Electronic Text - 2003-2004

Last Revision: 04/06/2004

NEW: Slides of the lectures

B33080 - 30 contact hours - 4 credits


[Week 1] [Week 2] [Week 3] [Week 4] [Week 5] [Week 6] [Week 7] [Week 8] [Week 9] [Week 10] [(X)HTML]


Lecturer: Edward Vanhoutte
CTB - Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie (KANTL)
Koningstraat 18 / b-9000 Gent
tel: +32 (0)9 265.93.51 / fax: +32 (0)9 265.93.49
edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be
Time: Monday 9-12u.30. - 2nd semester 2002-2003
Room: Computer room A9.02 (Library building A)
Contents: The use of electronic texts in all areas of current society and all disciplines of both the Humanities and the hard sciences is increasing enormously. Together with this trend, the problems attached to the use and interchange of electronic texts become more prominent: software- and platform-incompatibility, loss of data in converting files, problems of arciving, creation, use, etc. This course addresses these problems and focuses on the problematic position of electronic texts in the humanities. The student can also expect an introduction in the history and evolution of electronic publication media such as the Internet. In lectures, seminars, and workshops, we draw the attention to the creation and publication of electronic texts, and gain hands-on experience in using internationally accepted standards for text-encoding and markup - SGML, XML, (X)HTML, XSL, CSS, TEI... This course introduces tools and techniques which will be used by the students to produce an electronic publication. This year, we will concentrate on a new method for the encoding of modern manuscript material (DALF), and the students will prepare an electronic edition of some letters from the 19th and 20th century.
This course is not a web-design and web-publishing course.
Pre-required knowledge: Some elementary computer skills are required (know how to work with multiple windows, work with the mouse, create folders and files, download files from the internet), but an introductory session may be organised for students who are not up to elementary standards.
This course is taught in English. Foreign students are most welcome.
Format: Seminars and workshops with preparation.
Examination: Permanent evaluation, group assignment and (viva) report. Only students who take part in all parts of the assesment will be eligible for credits and marks on this course.
This year's group assignment is an electronic edition of the correspondence between Lynne Bryer & Daphne Rooke, two South African authors. The correspondence is kept in the National English Literary Museum (NELM) at Grahamstown, South Africa.
Required reading:
  • Susan Hockey (2000). Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Edward Vanhoutte & Ron Van den Branden (2003). DALF Guidelines for the Description and Encoding of Modern Correspondence Material. Version 1.0 . [html] [pdf]
  • Further required reading will be available in a reader and on this course website.
Suggested reading:
  • Tim Berners-Lee (1999). Weaving the Web - The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web by its inventor. London: Orion Business Press / San Francisco: Harper.
  • Tim Berners-Lee (2000). De wereld van het World Wide Web. Het oorspronkelijke ontwerp en de uiteindelijke bestemming van het World Wide Web, beschreven door zijn uitvinder. Amsterdam: Nieuwezijds.
  • Paul E. Ceruzzi (2003). A History of Modern Computing. Second edition. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press.
  • Noah Wardrip-Fruin & Nick Montfort (eds.) (2003). The New Media Reader. Cambridge, MA / London: The MIT Press.
  • The journals Literary & Linguistic Computing, Computers and the Humanities, Markup Languages: Theory and Practice and Human IT.
  • The maillists HUMANIST & TEI-L.
  • Further suggested readings will be available in a reader and on this course website.
Credits: This course counts for 4 ECTS credits, which equals a 120 hour workload. This is organized as follows:
  • Lectures: 30h.
  • Weekly preparation: 20h.
  • Group assignment: 60h.
  • Report: 10u.

Programme

Week 1 (16 February) Introduction to this course - Humanities Computing. [Slides]
Format Formal lecture
Preparation
  • Know how to download files from the internet
  • Know how to create folders and save files in folders
  • Know how to surf the internet, look and find information
  • Know how to email
Required reading
  • Vannevar Bush (1945). "As We May Think." The Atlantic Monthly July 1945, 176/1: 101-108.
  • Michael Fraser (1996). A Hypertextual History of Humanities Computing.
  • Susan Hockey (2000). Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    • chapter 1: "Why Electronic Texts?": 1-10
  • Willard McCarty (2002). Humanities Computing (Preliminary draft entry for The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, New York: Dekker, 2003.)
  • Theodor H. Nelson (1965). 'A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate.' Lewis Winner (ed.) Association for Computing Machinery: Proceedings of the 20th National Conference: 84-100.
Further reading
Assignment
  • Mail me (edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be) before Friday February 20th 12 a.m.
    1. a list of five different internet browsers with screenshots and or URI (WWW address) of the programs.
    2. a list of three Electronic Text Archives with their URI.

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Week 2 (23 February) Digitization of Images and Textual Resources: Dr. Melissa Terras - University College London.
Format Public Lecture
Required reading
  • H. Besser and J. Trant (1995). Introduction to Imaging. Los Angeles: The Getty Information Institute, The Getty Center.
    http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/introimages/index.html
  • Susan Hockey (2000). Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    • chapter 2: "Creating and Acquiring Electronic Texts": 11-23.
  • Lorna M. Hughes (2003). Digitizing collections. Strategic issues for the information manager. London: Facet publishing.
    • chapter 10: "Digitization of text and images": 255-282
  • Stuart D. Lee (2001). Digital imaging. A practical handbook. London: Facet Publishing.
    • chapter 3: "How do you digitize?": 35-75.
  • Alan Morrison, Michael Popham & Karen Wikander (2000). Creating and Documenting Electronic Texts: A Guide to Good Practice. Oxford: OTA.
Further reading
Assignment
  • Choose a document and analyse it (read chapter 2 of Morrison, Popham & Wikander (2000)).

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Week 3 (1 March) History of the Internet - Hypertext
XML theory and practice: Text Encoding & Markup - Document Analysis. [Slides]
Format Seminar
Required reading
  • Susan Hockey (2000). Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    • chapter 3: "Text Encoding": 24-48.
  • Alan Morrison, Michael Popham & Karen Wikander (2000). Creating and Documenting Electronic Texts: A Guide to Good Practice. Oxford: OTA.
Further reading
Assignment Copy your favourite poem to a plain text file (ASCII) *.txt and bring it with you on a disk on March 8th.

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Week 4 (8 March) XML theory and practice: SGML/XML - TEI - DTD - well formed XML. [Slides]
Format Seminar
Required reading
  • Edward Vanhoutte (2004). "An Introduction to the TEI and the TEI Consortium." in: Mats Dahlström, Espen S. Ore, & Edward Vanhoutte (eds.), Electronic Scholarly Editing – Some Northern European Approaches. A Special Issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing, 19/1 (2004): 9-16.
  • P4 TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. A Gentle Introduction to XML. [html] [xml] [pdf]
Course material

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Week 5 (15 March) XML theory and practice: valid XML - validating. [Slides]
Format Seminar
Course material
Downloads
Installation

Nsgmls is a validating parser. Download the binaries for Windows 95 en Windows NT and unzip and extract in a SP folder which you create. The setup creates three folders: bin, doc and pubtext. You can find the parser (nsgmls) in the bin folder.

Next, download the Runsp2 windows interface for nsgmls. Unzip the file in the bin folder of SP. By running runsp2.exe, runsp2 wil find nsgmls. Read runsp.txt carefully.

Copy the next files in the same bin folder:

Specify where nsgmls can find the catalog file under Options in the toolbar of runsp2.

Specify where nsgmls can find xml.dcl under Options in the toolbar of runsp2.
Assignment
  • Check, correct and validate the file error.xml (teixlite) which contains 54 errors, and explain how you correct this file in 9 steps. Mail me (edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be) your report before Friday 19 March, 12 a.m.

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Week 6 (22 March) TEI: TeixLite. [Slides]
Format Seminar
Required reading TEILite. "TEI U5: Encoding for Interchange: an introduction to the TEI." [html] [xml] [pdf]
Course material
Downloads
Installation

NoteTab Light is a very complete plain text editor which allows you to create SGML, XML, (X)HTML, CSS etc. documents.

Download the software on your computer and unzip the file with an Unzip program (e.g. WinZip). Double click the Setup.exe file and follow the install shield guidance. Once installed, run the program and select View > Options > File Filters. Select "New", and add the next details

  • Description: "xml"
  • Wildcards: "*.xml"
  • Click the OK button. Now you can save XML instances with the extension ".xml".

Repeat this operation for each file format you want to add to the software, e.g. CSS, XSL.

Select View > Options > HTML Files. Select "Create XHTML Tags" and select "Create Uppercase Tags" till you see a square in the box.

Download teixlite.clb (updated 22/03/2004) and save (with .clb extension!) in NoteTab Light/Libraries. The Tab "teixlite" will now appear in the tab-bar at the bottom of the programme window. Click to activate the library which will appear in the left margin.
Reference material
Assignment

Choose a a poem, a piece of prose etc. of ca. 1 page long and encode it using teixlite. Mail me (edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be) the XML file before Friday 26 March, 12 a.m.

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Week 7 (29 March) DALF. [Slides]
Format Seminar
Required Reading
  • Edward Vanhoutte & Ron Van den Branden, DALF guidelines for the description and encoding of modern correspondence material. Version 1.0. [html] [pdf]
  • Vanhoutte, Edward & Ron Van den Branden, 'Describing, Transcribing, Encoding, and Editing Modern Correspondence Material: a Textbase Approach.' Fred Unwalla & Peter Shillingsburg (eds.) Computing the edition. Toronto: Toronto University Press. [pdf]
Course material
Downloads
Assignment

Encode the four letters using DALF. Mail me (edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be) the XML files before Friday April 2nd, 12 a.m.

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Week 8 (19 April) XSL theory and practice: basics, XPath, functions. [Slides XML Basics] [Slides Xpath Functions]
Format Seminar
Required Reading
Downloads
Installation ;,
  • Java Virtual Machine: Install the Java VM by running the self-extracting setup package. Make sure to install in the folder "c:\java" (preferrably not under "program files"!).
  • Saxon:
    • java version:
      • extract the .zip file to the folder "c:\saxon".
      • run saxon from anywhere on the command line with the command "java -jar c:\saxon\saxon.jar [options] source-document stylesheet [params].
    • binary version:
      • extract the .zip file to the folder "c:\saxon".
      • run saxon from anywhere on the command line with the command "c:\saxon\saxon [options] source-document stylesheet [params]" (or by setting the environment variable SAXON_HOME to "c:\saxon" and including it in your system's PATH).
  • XPath Explorer:
    • copy the file "xpe.jar" to the folder "c:\xpe".
    • run XPE from anywhere on the command line with the command "java -jar c:\xpe\xpe.jar"
Further Reading
Assignment

Create a well-formed XML file and an XSLT file which together produce an HTML file consisting of:

  • The page title "Flip Kowlier is an den drank"
  • An ordered list of 6 drinks, in which each item is preceded by the word "Hello"
  • And in which the drink itself is rendered in italics and in red

Mail me (edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be) the XML file, the XSLT file and the generated HTML file before Friday April 23rd, 12 a.m.

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Week 9 (26 April): Project Management, Documentary "Into the Future", Group Project.
Format Seminar, Hands-on
Contents
  • Instigation
  • Selecting and assessing
  • Deciding
  • Setting up
  • Workflow
  • Costing
  • Hard- and software
  • Maintaining the records
  • Risk assessment and management
  • Grant applications
Required Reading
  • Marilyn Deegan & Simon Tanner (2001). Digital Futures. Strategies for the information age. London: Library Association Publishing.
    • chapter 4: "The economic factors": 84-105
  • Lorna M. Hughes (2003). Digitizing collections. Strategic issues for the information manager. London: Facet publishing.
    • chapter 4: "Project management and the institutional framework": 79-120
    • chapter 6: "Project planning and funding": 145-162
    • chapter 7: "Managing a digitization project": 163-207
  • Stuart D. Lee (2001). Digital imaging. A practical handbook. London: Facet Publishing.
    • chapter 4, section 4: "The costs of digitization": 92-102

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Week 10 (3 May): XSL theory and practice: Real XSLT. [Slides Real XSLT] [Slides Practical XSLT]
Format Seminar, Hands-on
Assignment Finish the excercises
Reference Material
  • the ZVON XSLT Reference: browsable HTML-pages (derived from XML source, btw) providing a handy reference tool
Further Reading
  • ... anything XSLT! search the web for answers
  • the TEI XSLT stylesheets [zip version] (for the brave): excellent example of marvellous XSLT design. Tough but rewarding!

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HTML 4.01 / XHTML 1.0
Required reading
Tools W3C HTML Validation Service
Downloads
Further reading

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XHTML author: Edward Vanhoutte
Last Revision: 04/06/2004

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