Workshops

The Summer School offers a range of parallel weeklong workshops on important areas of Digital Humanities. Each workshop consists of a total of 15 sessions or 30 week-hours. The number of participants in each workshop is limited to 15. Each participant can only take part in one course. Participants are requested to bring along their own materials and projects so that what is being taught can be directly applied and tested.

Introduction into the Creation of a Digital Edition - Christiane Fritze and Malte Rehbein

This practical workshop introduces techniques and methods of a digital editing project. It is designed as an interactive experiment in which we work on a small corpus of manuscripts and bring it to online publication. In such a learning-by-doing approach, typical processes in the creation of a digital edition are experienced by the participants which is instructed and coached by the workshop facilitators. We expect the participants to collaborate which each other during the workshop and to bring in their particular competencies and interests. Topics covered in the workshop encompass:

• Conceptualizing the editorial project;
• Document analysis;
• Data modelling;
• Transcription, annotation, and encoding;
• Quality assurance;
• Transforming and visualising textual data;
• Online publication.

Main emphasis is determined after consultation with the participants. Material is provided by the instructors. The practical part of the workshop is estimated by 75 % of the time.

From Document Engineering to Scholarly Web Projects - Alejandro G. Bia and Mar Carasco

Engineering document production

• Ways of Representing Texts Electronically
• Markup Basics
• The XML family of technologies
• Modeling document structure (DTDs and Schemas)
• Text markup using XML and TEI
• Text rendering & transformation

Scholarly Web Projects

• Digital Libraries
• Copyright issues on the Internet (& copyleft)
• Digital preservation
• Web 2.0, Semantic Web, Cultures of participation

Methods in Computer-Assisted Textual Analysis - Jan Rybicki and Maciej Eder

Corpus linguists, stylometrists, lexicographers, authorship attributors, numerologists, e-book fiends ... Sometimes they don’t even go to the same conferences. What brings them together, or what should be bringing them together, is their material: text – any text – in electronic form, and the tools of textual study: software that can manipulate electronic text in a variety of ways: count occurrences and frequencies, find relationships between various linguistic/textual units, chart these relationships and thus find patterns of similarity and difference between various corpora, text collections, texts, shorter textual units – with an additional perspective of searching for correspondences between corresponding texts, such as originals and translations.

Depending on the level of advancement of its participants, the workshop will consist of all or any of the stages: the basics of electronic text, the sources of electronic texts, simple numerical observations (various lengths and frequencies), vocabulary richness, most-frequent-word lists, multivariate analysis, existing tools (with emphasis on R scripts provided by the teachers).

The texts used for the workshops will be provided by the instructor; if necessary, the participants’ individual corpora will be expanded as needed and as available (online or elsewhere). The texts will be literary, multilingual, and include both originals and translations.

Digital History and Culture: methods, sources and future looks - Julianne Nyhan and Dot Porter

This course is aimed at researchers and information professionals who are planning, managing or currently researching the creation of an online history project. It will also interest those who wish to make significant use of existing historical resources in their research. In addition to giving an overview of the ‘state of the art’ of digital history resources, tools and techniques (e.g. text and image encoding, visualization, mashups and data mining) and infrastructures (e.g. grid) it aims to provide a solid grounding in the theory and practice of creating digital history. The emphasis will be on honing students ability to think critically about digital media and on developing an understanding of how research questions should drive technology choices, not vice versa.

The workshop will consist of both taught and hands-on modules. The taught modules will consist of a series of lectures and class discussions addressing important questions such as ‘What is digital history?’, ‘The digital historian and copyright law’ and ‘The Semantic Web, e-Science and emerging trends in digital history’. The hands-on modules will introduce students to an important aspect of digital history methodology: approaches to the modeling of knowledge contained in analog or digital historical sources using TEI-XML and also RDF. Both the image-based digital editing of historical texts, as well as text-based editing, will be explored. Technologies discussed will include the TEI modules for transcription and description, and methods for incorporating images into editions using tei:facsimile, the Image Markup Tool and TILE, as well as using CSS and XSLT for presenting editions.

Demonstrating the understanding they will have gained of XML technologies and approaches to digital history, students will work collaboratively to create a small online archive of sources relevant to the history of reading. A selection of required reading materials will be provided for students. In addition to reading these and participating in the class project mentioned above, students are asked to create and maintain a blog where they can reflect on aspects of their learning throughout the course.

At the end of this course students will be able to:

1. Describe the ‘state of the art’ in digital history projects, tools, techniques and infrastructures

2. Demonstrate understanding of document analysis

3. Demonstrate their understanding of XML technologies, and the advantages and disadvantages of such technologies for encoding historical documents, both as text and as object

4. Understand how purpose shapes practice in the design of digital history projects and choose or design markup accordingly

5. Discuss eScience and Semantic web trends and their relevance to the future of digital history