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HUMANITIES COMPUTING: Electronic Text - 2004-2005

Last Revision: 12/04/2005

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 2004-2005
Room: Computer room A9.02 (Library building A)
Contents: How can we make manuscripts legible and processable by computers? What does the computer mean for the humanities and how can we make true electronic editions? These and many other questions are the focus of the course Humanities Computing: Electronic Texts which is unique in the humanities in Belgium.
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 archiving, 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 the correspondence of the Belgian composer Louis De Meester (1904-1987).
This course is not a web-design and web-publishing course.
Pre-required knowledge: No special computer knowledge is required. However, the students are supposed to have some elementary computer skills (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 and group assignment (possibly with a 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 of Louis de Meester (1904-1987), a Belgian composer of electronic music e.g. for plays and movies. De Meester corresponded with a.o. Luis de Pablo, Lucien Goethals, Michel de Ghelderode, Mark Liebrecht, Herman Sabbe, Felix De Boeck, Luc Peire, Hugo Claus, René Metzemaekers, Horst Menzel and Paul De Vree. The letters are unique documents about the artistic life in Belgium and abroad in the period 1950-1980.
Required reading:
  • Susan Hockey (2000). Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (eds.), A Companion to Digital Humanities. Malden, MA/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell Publishing.
  • 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: 25h.
  • Group assignment: 65h.

Programme

Week 1 (7 February) Introduction to this course - Humanities Computing - History of modern 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
  • Marilyn Deegan (2000). Introduction. in Frances Condron, Michael Fraser & Stuart Sutherland (eds.), Guide to Digital Resources for the Humanities 2000. Oxford: CTI.
  • Susan Hockey (2004). 'The History of Humanities Computing.' in Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (eds.), A Companion to Digital Humanities. Malden, MA/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell Publishing. 3-19.
  • Andrea Laue (2004). 'How the Computer Works.' in Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (eds.), A Companion to Digital Humanities. Malden, MA/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell Publishing. 145-160.
  • Willard McCarty (2002). Humanities Computing (Preliminary draft entry for The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, New York: Dekker, 2003.)
Further reading
Multimedia
Assignment
  • Mail me (edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be) before Friday February 11th 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 (14 February) History of the Internet - Hypertext
XML theory and practice: Text & Computers - Text Encoding & Markup - Document Analysis - DTD [Slides]
Format Seminar
Required reading
  • Vannevar Bush (1945). "As We May Think." The Atlantic Monthly July 1945, 176/1: 101-108.
  • Susan Hockey (2000). Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    • chapter 1: "Why Electronic Texts?": 1-10
    • 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.
  • 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
  • Choose a document and analyse it (read chapter 2 of Morrison, Popham & Wikander (2000)).
  • Copy your favourite poem to a plain text file (ASCII) *.txt and bring it with you on a disk on February 21st.

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Week 3 (21 February) XML theory and practice: HTML - SGML/XML - TEI - well formed XML - DTD[Slides]
Format Seminar
Required reading
  • Alan Morrison, Michael Popham & Karen Wikander (2000). Creating and Documenting Electronic Texts: A Guide to Good Practice. Oxford: OTA.
  • 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 4 (28 February) XML theory and practice: Valid XML - Parsing/Validating - Teixlite [Slides]
Format Seminar
Required reading TEILite. "TEI U5: Encoding for Interchange: an introduction to the TEI." [html] [xml] [pdf]
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.
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
  • 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 March 4th, 12 a.m.
  • Choose 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 March 4th, 12 a.m.

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Week 5 (7 March) XML theory and practice: TEI - 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. 'Presentational and Representational Issues in Correspondence Reconstruction and Sorting.' 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): 45-54.
  • 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
  • LBMH160394.txt
  • LBMH270194.txt
  • LBMH270194b.txt
  • MHLB240294.txt
    		•
    Downloads
  • DALF.dtd
  • DALF10.clb
  • DALF10META.clb
    		•
    Assignment

    Choose a letter from, encode it using DALF, validate and mail me (edward.vanhoutte@kantl.be) the XML files before Thursday March 10th, 12 a.m.

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    Week 6 (14 March) XSL theory and practice: basics, XPath, functions: Ron Van den Branden [Slides DALF] [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

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    Week 7 (21 Maart): XSL theory and practice: Real XSLT: Ron Van den Branden [Slides Real 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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    Week 8 (11 April) 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

    Complete the questionnaire handed out by Dr. Terras and hand it in on April 18.

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    Week 9 (18 April) Group Project
    Format Seminar

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    Week 10 (25 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
    • Paul E. Ceruzzi (2003). 'Introduction: Defining "Computer"' in Paul E. Ceruzzi, A history of Modern Computing. Second edition. Cambridge, MA/London: the MIT Press. 1-12.
    • 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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    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: 12/04/2005

    Valid XHTML 1.0!