News

Online Registration for TEI Conference

Posted on by theteiadmin

Dear all,

Registration for the TEI Members’ Meeting and Conference in Würzburg is now possible via the TEI online store. Please follow the link from the conference’s website:
http://www.zde.uni-wuerzburg.de/tei_mm_2011/registration/

Make sure to secure your early registration discount and don’t forget to book accommodation as soon as possible as the contingents we have reserved are limited.

We are looking forward to seeing many of you in Würzburg!
On behalf of the local organizers and the program committee

Malte

—
Dr. Malte Rehbein

XML Holland TEI Code Challenge

Posted on by theteiadmin

XML Code Challenge

Are you able to code TEI files into an EPUB file using only XML standards like XProc and XSLT 2.0?

What is the challenge?

Develop an XProc pipeline in which a TEI encoded Multatuli book is converted to a valid EPUB file that can be sent to a book publisher/distributor like Centraal Boekhuis.

The intention is to prepare the book Millioenen-studiën by Multatuli for electronic publication by Centraal Boekhuis. The Digital Library of Dutch Literature (DBNL) has made a source file available that must be converted into an ePUB file that meets the requirements of Centraal Boekhuis. The book contains running text, but also pictures, footnotes, and some tables.

What can I win?

There are two prizes:

The first prize consists of:

  • A visit to a leading International XML Conference
  • A beautiful certificate
  • The title of “Open Standards Developer 2011”

The winner will also present his or her application during the XMLHolland Annual Conference (XMLAmsterdam 2011).

The second prize winner will receive a free pass to the XML Holland conference.

What do the judges expect?

We expect you to use (at least) XProc and XSLT 2.0. These standards claim to offer extensive opportunities to develop applications for processing XML files. With this competition, we challenge you to show whether these standards are actually suitable for developing a complete XML application. Or is a real programming language still required?

Using a programming language besides XSLT 2.0 is allowed, but the less programming done in other languages, the more the solution will be appreciated. The goal is a solution based entirely on open standards.

We will judge the entries on the application of the standards, the code and performance. Obviously the output files should be valid EPUB files. They must in any case easily open in Adobe Digital Editions. We will validate the files with EpubCheck 1.2, the same validation that is required by Centraal Boekhuis. Furthermore, the panel will also evaluate the quality of the e-books. Do they look good, do internal links work, is the front cover shown, how are foot- and endnotes dealt with, are the pictures in the right place, is the table of contents correct and is the metadata present?

What should I deliver?

Turn in your solution with the output, the source code and instructions that will enable the judges to create the EPUB themselves using your program.

When should I deliver?

Send in submissions by Oct. 19, 2011 to voorzitter@xmlholland.nl

Who are the judges? The panel consists of experts with a proven track record in the open standards community. For
XMLHolland Code Challenge 2011, the following people will be judges:

  • Patrick Steenvoorden, manager Digitale Diensten at Centraal Boekhuis
  • Irsan Widarto, co-founder and CTO of X-Hive, now Director of XML Engineering at EMC
  • René van Stipriaan, co-founder of Digitale database voor de Nederlandse Letteren (www.dbnl.org)
  • Bas Peters, solutions architect at VLC and experienced developer and architect in the world of XML, Open Standards and Open Source
  • Sebastian Rahtz, Information Manager of Oxford University Computing Services and XML expert, especially TEI

Request for Proposals: TEI Conference and Members Meeting, 2012

Posted on by theteiadmin

The TEI Conference and Members’ Meeting takes place every year, usually in late October or early November. As far as possible, the venue alternates between Europe and North America. Previous hosts have included the University of Würzburg Centre for Digital Editing (2011), the University of Zadar (2010), the University of Michigan Libraries (2009), King’s College London (2008), and the University of Victoria (2006). The format of the event is not fixed, but generally keeps the following pattern:

  • 2 or 3 days of pre-conference workshops
  • 3 days of conference sessions, keynote lectures, poster sessions, and meetings of TEI Special Interest Groups

The Annual General Meeting for members of the TEI Consortium is also held during the event. Accounts are presented and election results declared at this AGM, which is open to the public.

The three days of the main conference normally take place between the Thursday and Saturday of the week of the conference. The pre-conference workshops may vary in length from a single morning or afternoon to a full two days.
Attendance at the conference has varied between about 70 and 200, to some extent depending on location, but 100 is the usual average attendance. The TEI Consortium will subsidize a share of the direct costs incurred in running the event, up to a maximum of US$5200. Bids should include a budget indicating the level of additional funding anticipated and its likely source (local institutions, commercial sponsorship etc.) The TEI normally charges and retains a small attendance fee, in the region of $100 to covers its own overheads to ensure that it is able to underwrite the cost of future conferences.

Bids for the 2012 conference must be received no later than 1 September 2011. Institutions considering making a proposal are requested to contact the chair of the TEI Board (martinmueller@northwestern.edu) as soon as possible to discuss their proposal. Completed bids should include the following information:

  • The name of the institution(s) making the bid and a list of proposed members of the local organising team
  • The name, address, email, and telephone number of a contact person
  • A brief description of the facilities available for the event (rooms, equipment, technical support, food)
  • A preliminary budget

In submitting bids, local organisers are strongly encouraged to be creative: the TEI meeting is an expression of the TEI community in all its diversity and should be seen as an opportunity to showcase local interests and strengths.

Bids will be reviewed by the TEI board deuring September, and a decision taken in time to announce the venue at the 2011 Meeting in Wurzburg.

Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative: Inaugural Edition

Posted on by theteiadmin

On behalf of the editors, I am delighted to announce the publication of the first issue of this new peer-reviewed publication:

Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative (jTEI)

This issue, guest edited by Syd Bauman, Kevin Hawkins, and Malte Rehbein, contains selected papers presented at the 2008 and 2009 conferences and members’ meetings:

  • John Unsworth – “Computational Work with Very Large Text Collections: Interoperability, Sustainability, and the TEI”
  • Tanya Clement – “Knowledge Representation and Digital Scholarly Editions in Theory and Practice”
  • Thomas Schmidt – “A TEI-based Approach to Standardising Spoken Language Transcription”
  • Lynne Siemens, Ray Siemens, Hefeng (Eddie) Wen, Cara Leitch, Dot Porter, Liam Sherriff, Karin Armstrong, and Melanie Chernyk – “‘The Apex of Hipster XML GeekDOM’: TEI-encoded Dylan and Understanding the Scope of an Evolving Community of Practice”

The journal is published by the TEI Consortium on Revues.org,  the web platform for journals and book collections of Cléo, the French Centre for Open Electronic Publishing.

jTEI’s home is at jtei.revues.org where you can find information about the journal as well as links to the journal’s administrative website, which is used for managing the submission, review, and editing process.

I hope you enjoy reading this issue. Please consider contributing to the journal by submitting articles for future issues. We also welcome ideas for special issues.

Susan Schreibman
Editor-in-Chief
Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative

—
Susan Schreibman, PhD
Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities
School of English
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin 2, Ireland

email: susan.schreibman@tcd.ie
phone: +353 1 896 3694
fax: +353 1 671 7114

Digital Humanities Workshops at Brown University

Posted on by theteiadmin

Registration is now open for the Brown University Women Writers Project’s summer and fall workshops on topics in TEI and digital humanities:

http://www.wwp.brown.edu/outreach/seminars/

These workshops are aimed at humanities faculty, librarians, students, and anyone interested in getting a strong introduction to digital humanities concepts, methods, and tools. Each workshop combines hands-on practice with discussion and lectures, and participants are encouraged to work with their own project materials. These small group events offer an opportunity to learn about other digital projects as well as to master important methods and concepts in an exploratory
setting.

More information, including detailed workshop descriptions and registration information, can be found at http://www.wwp.brown.edu/outreach/seminars/

Students and members of the TEI consortium receive a 33% discount on registration.

All workshops are held at Brown University. Space is limited so please register early.

July 20-22, 2011
Introduction to XSLT for Digital Humanities
Syd Bauman and David Birnbaum
$450 ($300 for students and TEI members)

August 29-31, 2011
Introduction to TEI Customization
Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman
$450 ($300 for students and TEI members)

September 26-28, 2011
Introduction to Text Encoding and Contextual Information with TEI
Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman
$450 ($300 for students and TEI members)

December 5-7, 2011
Introduction to Manuscript Encoding with TEI
Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman
$450 ($300 for students and TEI members)

We hope to see you in Providence!

best wishes, Julia

Julia Flanders
Director, Women Writers Project
Center for Digital Initiatives, Brown University Library
http://www.wwp.brown.edu
http://library.brown.edu/cds/

Balisage Call for Late-breaking News

Posted on by theteiadmin

Proposals for Late-breaking News presentations at Balisage are due June 10th.

http://www.balisage.net/latebreaking-call.html

The peer-reviewed part of the Balisage 2011 program has been scheduled (http://www.balisage.net/2011/Program.html). A few slots have been reserved for presentation of “Late-breaking” material.  In order to be in serious contention for addition to the final program, your proposal should be either:

a) really late-breaking (it reports on something that happened in the last month or two) or
b) a well-developed paper, an extended paper proposal, or a very long abstract with references on a topic related to Markup and not already on the 2011 conference program.

The competition for late-breaking slots is fiercer than for regular peer-reviewed papers. Now is the time to start writing or to encourage someone you want to hear from at Balisage to get to work.

For more information see: http://www.balisage.net/latebreaking-call.html

or send email to: info@balisage.net

Digital.Humanities@Oxford Summer School 2011

Posted on by theteiadmin

This is a reminder that we are running a comprehensive 5 day Summer School in Digital Humanities this summer.
It takes place from July 25th-29th, at Oxford University Computing Services and Wolfson College.

The summer school introduces a range of digital research components to researchers, project managers, research assistants, or students working on any kind of project concerned with the creation or management of digital data for the humanities.

Please visit http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/DHSS2011/ for details.

The summer school is a collaboration for Digital.Humanities@Oxford between Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS),Oxford e-Research Centre (OERC), e-Research South, and Wolfson College Digital Research Cluster, under the direction of Sebastian Rahtz and Dr James Cummings at OUCS.

The programme will consist of:

• Two parallel streams of morning practical sessions using the well-equipped It teaching facilities at OUCS
• Two parallel streams of afternoon workshops at Wolfson College concentrating on techniques and best practice
• Guest lectures from Digital Humanities experts about their research projects

Our guest plenary speakers for this year include:

David De Roure, Professor of e-Science at OeRC
Jeni Tennison, UK eGov guru
John Coleman, Director of the Phonetics Laboratory
Min Chen, Professor of Visualization at OeRC
Ray Siemens, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Professor of English at the University of Victoria

Topics include:
• Best practice for digital linguistic corpora
• Building queryable document-based websites
• Creating community collections and digital outreach
• Creating digital texts in XML using the TEI
• Working with maps
• Critical apparatus and digital genetic editions in TEI
• Database design for humanities projects
• Digital Images for the Humanities
• Digital library technologies and best practice
• Getting funding: quality, impact, sustainability.
• Introduction to copyright and open licensing
• Introduction to document/project modelling
• Introduction to XML databases
• Managing Digital Humanities Projects
• Practical RDF modelling and conversion
• Publishing XML files using XSLT
• RDF querying and visualization
• TEI for linking text and facsimiles
• Tools for analyzing linguistic corpora
• Visualization using jQuery
• Working with audio files
NOTE: Early Bird registration discounts end on 16 May!

VOICE XML Corpus and VOICE 1.1 Online

Posted on by theteiadmin

VOICE XML is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) and includes all corpus texts in XML format as well as derived HTML and TXT versions of the corpus with reduced mark-up. For more information on VOICE XML see https://www.univie.ac.at/voice/page/corpus_availability_xml and consult
the README file included in the download package.

In addition, the release of VOICE XML also marks the release of VOICE 1.1, an updated version of the corpus that includes minor revisions in some of the corpus texts. As of today, the web interface of VOICE Online
is therefore updated to VOICE 1.1 Online (https://www.univie.ac.at/voice/page/corpus_availability_online).

We hope you will find these additional resources helpful, and we are looking forward to receiving any kind of feedback you might have (please mail to voice@univie.ac.at).

We have recently started a new subsection on VOICE-based publications on our website and would like to invite you to let us know when you (have) publish(ed) or present(ed) work which makes use of VOICE Online and/or VOICE XML.

California Digital Library Announces Release of XTF Version 3.0

Posted on by theteiadmin

California Digital Library Announces Release of XTF Version 3.0

Oakland, CA, April 5, 2011 – The California Digital Library (CDL) is pleased to announce the release of version 3.0 of XTF (http://xtf.cdlib.org/), an open source, highly flexible software application that supports the search, browse and display of heterogeneous digital content.  XTF provides efficient and practical methods for creating customized end-user interfaces for distinct digital content collections and is used by institutions worldwide.

Highlights from the 3.0 release include:

  • Scanned book display support in default UI
  • Stability improvements to index rotation support
  • Globalization and RSS support
  • Further Unicode improvements
  • Many bug fixes

See the full change log (http://xtf.cdlib.org/documentation/changelog/) for further details.

XTF is a combination of Java and XSLT 2.0 that indexes, queries, and displays digital objects and is based on open source software (e.g. Lucene and Saxon).  XTF can be downloaded from the XTF website (http://xtf.cdlib.org/download/) or from the XTF Project page on SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xtf/), where the source code can also be found.

The XTF website also provides a self-guided tutorial and a sample of the default installation (http://xtf.cdlib.org:8080/xtf/search), demonstrating the capabilities of the tool out-of-the-box. Both of these resources provide a quick view of the capabilities of XTF prior to download.

Offering a suite of customizable features that support diverse intellectual access to content, XTFinterfaces can be designed to support the distinct tools and presentations that are useful and meaningful to specific audiences.  In addition, XTF offers the following core features:

  • Easy to deploy: Drops directly in to a Java application server such as Tomcat or Resin; has been tested on Solaris, Mac, Linux, and Windows operating systems.
  • Easy to configure: Can create indexes on any XML element or attribute; entire presentation layer is customizable via XSLT.
  • Robust: Optimized to perform well on large documents (e.g., a single text that exceeds 10MB of encoded text); scales to perform well on collections of millions of documents; provides full Unicode support.
  • Extensible:
    • Works well with a variety of authentication systems (e.g., IP address lists, LDAP, Shibboleth).
    • Provides an interface for external data lookups to support thesaurus-based term expansion, recommender systems, etc.
    • Can power other digital library services (e.g., XTF contains an OAI-PMH data provider that allows others to harvest metadata, and an SRU interface that exposes searches to federated search engines).
    • Can be deployed as separate, modular pieces of a third-party system (e.g., the module that displays snippets of matching text).
  • Powerful for the end user:
    • Spell checking of queries
    • Faceted displays for browsing
    • Dynamically updated browse lists
    • Session-based bookbags

These basic features can be tuned and modified.  For instance, the same bookbag feature that allows users to store links to entire books, can also store links to citable elements of an object, such as a note or other reference.

Examples of XTF-based applications both within and outside of the CDL include:

Call for Papers: ‘Digital Resources for Palaeography’ Symposium

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‘Digital Resources for Palaeography’ One-Day Symposium
5th September 2011, King’s College London

The ‘Digital Resource and Database of Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic’ (DigiPal) at the Centre for Computing in Humanities at King’s College London is pleased to announce a one-day symposium on digital resources for palaeography.

In recent years, scholars have begun to develop and employ new technologies and computer-based methods for palaeographic research. The aim of the symposium is to present developments in the field, explore the limits of digital and computational-based approaches, and share methodologies across projects which overlap or complement each other.

Papers of 20 minutes in length are invited on any relevant aspect of digital methods and resources for palaeography and manuscript studies. Possible topics could include:

•       Project reports and/or demonstrations
•       Palaeographical method; ‘Digital’ and ‘Analogue’ palaeography
•       Quantitative and qualitative approaches
•       ‘Scientific’ methods, ‘objectivity’ and the role of evidence in manuscript studies
•       Visualisation of manuscript evidence and data
•       Interface design and querying of palaeographical material

To propose a paper, please send a brief abstract (250 words max) to digipal@kcl.ac.uk. The deadline for receipt of submissions is 8th May 2011. Notice of acceptance will be sent by 20th May 2011.
—
Dr Stewart J Brookes
Research Associate
Digital Resource for Palaeography
King’s College London