Digital Humanities: Computer-assisted Genetic Editing

About

An intensive 5-day entry level hands-on course on making digital editions of analogue and born-digital texts. In this course, participants will acquire a set of basic computer skills such as xml mark-up language and handwritten text recognition to design a fully-fledged, TEI-compatible Digital Scholarly Edition and deploy keystroke logging technology to record and analyse born-digital texts.

Whether you're starting your journey in digital humanities or looking to expand your skillset, this course provides the perfect foundation to bring your projects to life.

Target group

Bachelor (3rd year) and Master students, PhDs and postdocs, Professionals in the fields of textual scholarship, genetic criticism, library science, archiving practices.

Participants should have at least completed 2 full years of university education in a relevant field of study. 

No prior knowledge of Digital Humanities is required to successfully complete the programme.

Course aim

The main goal of the course is to furnish students with a set of tools in order for them to be able to edit analogue and born-digital documents (mostly literary and historical texts). Upon completion of the course, students will know the following on the basic to intermediary level:
the basic syntactic rules of the descriptive meta-markup language XML;
what the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is, and how its XML-based vocabulary is used to transcribe source material;
what IIIF is and how it is used for making digital objects available online;
how Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) works and how to use the Transkribus platform for the (automatic) transcription of source documents;
how the Axolotl XML editor can be used for HTR postprocessing (i.e. to encode the revision process as recorded in the documents) and to collaborate in a digital editing project;
how to use XPath to query and navigate through XML documents;
how to use XSLT to transform XML documents into another data format, such as HTML;
how to use HTML and CSS for creating web pages as part of a digital edition;
how keystroke logging software can be deployed for editing digital writing processes;
As an outcome, students get the chance to make their own mini-edition, hosted as a GitHub-page, either using their own material or using the material provided by our team.
In addition to these transferrable skills, students acquire theoretical knowledge of modern editing methods as practised in the field of Digital Humanities and Digital (Genetic/Scholarly) Editing.

Fee info

The tuition fee includes course material, coffee breaks, lunches, social activities and a conference dinner. It does not include travel and accommodation.