Conference Agenda

This half-day (approximately 3 hours) workshop will introduce TEI publishing with static site generators and front-end technologies, namely React JS and the static site generator Gatsby. It will introduce the attendees to the publishing strategies and tool sets developed for the reboot of the online Scholarly Editing journal (https://scholarlyediting.org/), which publishes, among essay-like content, TEI-based small scale editions. This workshop is aimed at attendees who already have some experience with programming (including XSLT) and the command line; however, all are welcome and will be supported as much as possible throughout the workshop.

The publishing tools presented in this workshop were developed for the reboot of the Scholarly Editing journal, which published its newest issue, volume 39, in April 2022. The previous site, built with Apache Cocoon, was converted into a static site and made accessible as an archive (https://scholarlyediting.org/se.index.issues.html). The new website and journal issues are built using Gatsby, a static site generator that relies on React JS for building user interfaces. The journal’s editors chose to adopt a static site generator because, once built, static sites do not need maintenance and can be easily moved and archived. This requires less infrastructure to publish and keep online the site on the web, which is desirable both for keeping operational costs of the journal low and to ensure its longevity. XML technologies can be and are used to generate static sites; the TEI Guidelines are a notable example. Regardless of how the static site is built, the result has minimal infrastructure requirements. A server is always needed to publish something on the web, but its role is limited to sending files over to the client, essentially just supporting HTTP GET operations. This is cheap and it makes it possible to rely on affordable web hosting, or take advantage of free services, or even use a home server.

During the workshop, participants will create a Gatsby website starting from a provided template that includes the TEI rendering tools gatsby-transformer-ceteicean and gatsby-theme-ceteicean. These tools re-implement principles pioneered by CETEIcean, which relies on the browser’s DOM processing and HTML5 Custom Elements to publish TEI documents as a component pluggable into any HTML structure (Cayless and Viglianti 2018). Example TEI documents to integrate into the website will be provided, but attendees are encouraged to bring their own.

After an introduction on static sites, the motivations for using them, and an open discussion, the workshop will introduce:

• How to set up Gatsby and the CETEIcean plugins
• How to use built-in behaviors
• Customization via CSS (and CSS-in-JS)
• Defining custom behaviors as React components
• Applying transformation to TEI documents before and after ingestion into Gatsby.

If time allows, we will conclude with open discussion and collaborative experimentation.

Participants must bring their own laptop and be able to install (free) software on it. Internet access will be required. The tutor will require a projector.

References:

Cayless, Hugh, and Raffaele Viglianti. “CETEIcean: TEI in the Browser.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2018, Washington, DC, July 31 - August 3, 2018. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2018. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 21 (2018). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol21.Cayless01.

Biography:

Dr. Raffaele (Raff) Viglianti is a Senior Research Software Developer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland. His research is grounded in digital humanities and textual scholarship, where “text” includes musical notation. He researches new and efficient practices to model and publish textual sources as innovative and sustainable digital scholarly resources. Dr. Viglianti is currently an elected member of the Text Encoding Initiative technical council and the Technical Editor of the Scholarly Editing journal.

XProc is an XML based programming language for processing documents in pipelines. Version 1.0 of the language was published as W3C Recommendation in 2010. The specification of the next version, XProc 3.0, is expected to be published as a community group report in late 2022. While XProc does not seem to have had big adoption in the digital humanities, it is successfully used in various branches of the publishing industry.

This half-day workshop will teach the participants the basic concepts of an XProc processing pipeline (pipelines, steps, ports) and practice their application in a series of excercises. The overall goal of the workshop is to enable to participants to write pipelines that chain common markup manipulation tasks such as loading, transforming, validating that can be used as building blocks for more elaborate steps or as one-off scripts in data maintenance.

From the participants the workshop requires a general understanding of XML document editing and basic knowledge of XPath. The material requirements are a projector and laptops to follow through with the examples given in the workshop. Any operating system with a recent Java Runtime is sufficient.

Participants are recommended to bring their own device.

In this half-day hands-on workshop, participants will learn how to use LEAF-Writer - an open-source, open-access Extensible Markup Language (XML) editor that runs in a web browser and offers scholars and their students a rich textual editing experience without the need to download, install, and configure proprietary software, pay ongoing subscription fees, or learn complex coding languages. This user-friendly editing environment incorporates Text Encoding Initiatives (TEI) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) standards, meaning that texts edited in LEAF-Writer are interoperable with other texts produced by the scholarly editing community and with other materials produced for the Semantic Web.

Participants will learn how to make the most of LEAF-Writer’s extensive capabilities on their own laptops.They will learn how to choose among TEI customizations that best support their work in diplomatic and/or semantic markup, add inline scholarly notes and glosses, and create annotations - tagging named entities and associating them with recognized authorities like VIAF, Wikidata, and Getty - that do double duty as in-text identifiers and potential contributions to the Semantic Web.

It has been a decade since Johanna Drucker reminded us that all data are capta in the TEI-encoded pages of Digital Humanities Quarterly. In some ways this may appear to be self-evident in the context of the TEI: for many TEI users, their primary encoded material is text, and the TEI tags are a textual intervention in the sea of primary text – the resulting markup is not data, as in something objectively observed, but rather capta, as in something situated, partial, and contextually freighted (as indeed is all data. All data is capta). That said, Drucker warns her readers against self-evident claims.

Drawing on Drucker's arguments, this keynote explores the tension in several of the TEI's models, and the challenges that arise from our need to have fixed start and end points, bounding boxes, interps, certainty, events, traits (the list goes on!) in order to do our analytical work. Drawing on a number of projects, I argue for the value of our shared markup language and the value it offers us through its data-like behaviour, even as it foregrounds how clearly how much TEI data, and indeed, all data, are capta.