XML-TEI document encoding, structuring, rendering and transformation

The vast majority of humanities research data is marked-up and stored as XML-TEI documents. We can say that TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) has become the de-facto standard technology within the digital humanities.

This workshop aims at introducing the attendees to the practical aspects of encoding XML documents marked-up according to the TEI guidelines, and then making use of these documents by applying other technolgies like Xpath, CSS, XSLT, and Xquery.

This workshop consists of a mix of talks and hands-on sessions, and the teaching approach is problem-based learning by means of exercises of increasing complexity.

It will be divided into two parts, lasting a week each, which can be taken independently.

• Week 1: will provide a gentle basic introduction to the production of digital text documents using XML and the TEI encoding scheme. It also deals with designing and validating document structures. This is a theoretical-practical, introductory-level course.
• Week 2: will move beyond encoding and will introduce Xpath, CSS, XSLT and XQuery. XML-TEI document rendering and transformation, deals with producing nice renderings by means of CSS stylesheets and XSLT transformations, and selecting/quering specific data using Xpath and Xquery. This is a hands-on, medium-level course.

Since its creation, TEI development has been driven by the needs of a large user community. The introduction to the features of TEI during the workshop will give participants a starting point to develop their own TEI-based projects.

Syllabus of week 1: Introduction to XML-TEI text encoding

INTRODUCTION:

• Introduction
• Ways of representing documents electronically
• Markup basics (SGML/XML)

DOCUMENT ENCODING:

• Text markup using XML and TEI
• High level tags
• Low level tags
• Markup of different literary styles
• Special-purpose tagsets

DOCUMENT STRUCTURING:

• Controlling document structure (DTDs and Schemas)

Syllabus of week 2: XML-TEI document rendering and transformation

INTRODUCTION

• The XML family of technologies
• Namespaces

DOCUMENT RENDERING:

• CSS sylesheets applied to XML and HTML documents

DOCUMENT TRANSFORMATION:

• Selecting nodes with Xpath
• XSLT transformations
• Visual modelling of document structures

OTHER ISSUES (if time allows)