In this half day workshop, participants will learn how to use FairCopy to transform historical texts into online digital editions. Using crowdsourced transcriptions as a starting point, we will add semantic structure and mark names of people, places, and events. We will then publish our digital editions using Hugo.

The TEI Guidelines have been used by hundreds of scholarly projects and are an essential tool for researching, preserving, and disseminating cultural heritage world-wide. And yet, despite its mission to provide a common vocabulary for describing texts, TEI faces problems of adoption and use in the wider scholarly community. While the basics of TEI XML encoding are simple enough, true fluency in TEI requires institutional support and commitment in the form of training, technical staff, IT infrastructure, and the time and commitment of the individual scholar.

Even within institutions that have these resources, projects often adopt a simpler interface for domain experts to interact with. This interface then translates the scholar’s work into TEI behind the scenes. This is sometimes accomplished technologically, sometimes through a tiered system of labor, or both. These interfaces are more often than not specialized to the needs of the projects which develop them. This current state of affairs leads to a structural problem of access which further limits whose texts can be digitized and preserved.

FairCopy addresses this problem of access by providing a simple editing environment in which anyone can produce valid TEI documents. FairCopy doesn’t hide the complexity of TEI, but rather makes it available for users to explore at their own pace. Users are quickly comfortable with its interface and able to focus on the text, not XML syntax.

FairCopy has support for most of the 500+ elements in TEI and allows users to customize a schema for their particular project. Scholars can seamlessly import and export TEI-XML documents. Additionally, scholars can bring in IIIF images of primary resources and link them to their transcriptions.

In this half day workshop, participants will learn how to use FairCopy to transform historical texts into online digital editions encoded using TEI. Using crowdsourced transcriptions as a starting point, we will add semantic structure and mark names of people, places, and events. We will then publish our digital editions using Hugo.

In the first part of the workshop, we will begin with a demonstration of FairCopy. We will then select texts to work on based on participants interests. Participants are encouraged to bring their own texts. Finally, we will break into small groups.

In the second part, each group will work on encoding a text using FairCopy. Participants will work collaboratively to choose elements and attributes that best suit their selected texts. The presenter will float between groups answering questions.

In the third part, we will export our texts into a pre-made Hugo template that can display both the original IIIF page images and the TEI encoded texts.

Participants in this workshop will need to bring a Mac, Windows, or Linux laptop on which they can install FairCopy for free. No web design or XML skills are required.

Participants in this workshop will learn how to use FairCopy to create a digital edition. They will also learn about using TEI semantics to structure and mark texts. The will also gain familiarity with using IIIF Manifests to interoperate between library collections and digital editions.

Presenter Bio

Nick Laiacona is a partner at Performant Software Solutions LLC. Performant serves clients in the Digital Humanities throughout North America and Europe. Laiacona has developed tools for critical digital editions including: Juxta, Digital Mappa, TextLab, and now FairCopy. Laiacona has helped produce a number of critical editions, including “Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France” and the “Melville Electronic Library.”