Week 2, Day 1: Monday, July 17
Synopsis
Scholars create digital editions to serve research purposes that may differ from project to project. The first day of Week 2 begins by exploring the role in project planning of defining research goals (which includes defining non-goals in order to avoid scope-creep). From planning and research questions we move to modeling and structuring the digital edition workflow as a computational pipeline, encouraging a modular perspective on digital editing.
Outcome goals
- Don’t touch that keyboard! Planning your edition: starting with research questions
- Where data modeling belongs in the workflow
- Markup as an expression of a data model; making the implicit explicit and machine-actionable
- The relationships among model, syntax, and markup semantics
- How modeling reduces iterations of the document analysis → schema development → markup pipeline
- XML looks like a string but it’s really a tree. What does this mean for modeling, markup, and querying or processing?
Legend
- Presentation: by instructors
- Discussion: instructors and participants
- Talk lab: participants discuss or plan in small groups
- Code lab: participants code alone or in small groups
9:00–10:30: Planning your project
There cannot be a single set of best practice recommendations for all digital editions because scholars create editions to meet different research goals, and they do that under different working conditions. What’s the purpose of your edition, and what are the resources at your disposal and the constraints on your efforts?
| Time | Topic | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 10 min | Overview of Week 2 | Presentation |
| 30 min | Explore project planning questions | Discussion |
| 25 min | Apply project planning questions to your own project (individually or collaboratively) | Talk lab |
| 25 min | General discussion of Talk lab results | Discussion |
10:30–11:00: Coffee break
11:00–12:30: Model, syntax, and markup semantics
How can the elaboration of a digital edition be modularized? How are model, syntax, and markup semantics similar and different?
| Time | Topic | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 20 min | Explore model, syntax, and markup semantics | Presentation |
| 25 min | Explore plain text as model and expression | Discussion |
| 25 min | Explore XML as model and expression | Discussion |
| 20 min | Explore other models and their expressions: LMNL, GODDAG, TexMECS, TAG | Presentation |
12:30–2:00: Lunch
2:00–3:30: Transcription with markup: XML
How are documents like trees and how are they different? What is represented by the model alone (the XML tree), and what requires markup semantics (schema)? What’s hard in XML and how do we do it anyway?
| Time | Topic | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 10 min | Create your own fork of our Institute GitHub repository | Code lab |
| 20 min | XML as a tree (OHCO: “ordered hierarchy of content objects” | Discussion |
| 15 min | Making the implicit explicit with markup | Discussion |
| 30 min | Tag “Ozymandias” in XML (e.g., lines, sentences, phrases, speakers, words, feet, syllables, stress) | Code lab |
| 15 min | What’s hard in XML | Discussion |
3:30–4:00: Coffee break
4:00–5:30: XML as a tree / XPath
| Time | Topic | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 10 min | Review of Week 2, Day 1, Modeling and communities | Discussion |
| 35 min | XPath as a way of navigating the tree (using Hamlet) | Code lab |
| 20 min | XPath navigation of overlap in “Ozymandias”: Find 1) phrases, 2) enjambments, and 3) metrical lines | Code lab |
| 15 min | The cost of workarounds during processing | Presentation |
| 10 min | What’s so bad about markup semantics, the application layer, and workarounds? | Discussion |
We’ll end each day with a request for feedback, based on a general version of the day’s outcome goals, and we’ll try to adapt on the fly to your responses. Please complete Week 2, Day 1 feedback (just copy and paste it into a plain-text document) and email your response to Kaylen at kaylensanders@pitt.edu with the subject heading “Week 2, Day 1 feedback”.