English – Pixelating

This workshop is an introduction to Text Encoding Initiative: an open-source, community based, multilingual standard for digital textual scholarship that gives scholars a vocabulary and a method to create richly expressive and critically informed versions of their texts (whether that be a poem, a novel, a manuscript, an inscription on a tombstone, or even an audio recording). This workshop thus has two main goals: (1) introduce participants to textual encoding and the wide range of possibilities that are afforded by good, critical markup and (2) help participants understand why TEI might work for their own projects.

By the end of this one-hour workshop, participants should become familiar with the variety of projects that use TEI, understand the expressive power of the TEI, and walk away understanding how working in TEI could be benefit their upcoming translation, edition, transcription, et cetera. This workshop is open to anyone interested in “text,” however broadly defined. Absolutely no technical skills are required, but participants are asked to bring a text (either analog or digital) to work with during the workshop. The workshop instructor is Joey Takeda, a graduate student in the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures.

Bio

Joey Takeda is a digital humanities programmer for a number of projects, including The Map of Early Modern London, Linked Early Modern Drama Online, and The Stratford Festival Online. He is currently an MA student in the Department of English (Science and Technology research stream) at UBC, specializing in indigenous and diasporic literature in Canada.

Thursday, September 20, 12.00-1.00pm, Koerner Library, Room 153. Please register: https://events.library.ubc.ca/dashboard/view/7452

Departing from the oft-asked question of “How do I know when my project is finished?”, this presentation centers around the question “How do I end my digital project, even if I don’t think it’s done?” Though various criteria have been proposed for evaluating the “done-ness” of a project (see, for example, this Digital Humanities Quarterly 2009 article), there has been little discussion about how to ensure that your project is archivable, accessible, and stable even if the project’s primary objects—say, an edition of a text—do not completely meet your project’s definition of “done.”

The Endings project, based out of the University of Victoria, is a collaborative project between digital humanities programmers, project directors, and university librarians that focuses less on content-based “done-ness” and more on best practices for archivable and sustainable scholarship. While the digital projects that form the core of the Endings project—The Robert Graves Diary, Le Mariage Sous L’Ancien Régime, The Nxaʔamxcín Dictionary Project, and The Map of Early Modern London,—are all at varying stages of completion, they share a common set of principles that lead to maximum archivability and accessibility.

In this presentation, Takeda discusses two of these projects at either end of the completion spectrum: The Robert Graves Diary, which was technically finished in the mid-2000s but required significant upgrades throughout the last decade; and The Map of Early Modern London, a long-standing project whose many objectives include a complete set of the extant mayoral pageants of London from 1585 to 1639 by 2022. Through these projects, Takeda explores and shares what makes a project “Endings-compliant” and offers up some best principles for thinking about how to end your digital humanities project from the start.

Bio:

Joey Takeda is a digital humanities programmer for a number of number of projects, including The Map of Early Modern London, Linked Early Modern Drama Online, The Internet Shakespeare Editions, and The Stratford Festival Online. He is currently an MA student in the Department of English (Science and Technology research stream) at UBC, specializing in indigenous and diasporic literatures in Canada.

(Date changed to Thursday, June 28, 2018, 12.00pm)

Tag: English

What is TEI and Why Should I Care?

Ending Your Digital Humanities Project from the Start