Text Encoding 1: Text mark-up with TEI for humanities research

Wednesday 23^rd November 2016, 1pm-4pm

Venue: Civic Design PC Teaching Centre, Gordon Stephenson Building, University of Liverpool

Instructor: Dr. Godfried Croenen (University of Liverpool)

New digital technologies and markup tools have provided humanities researchers with exciting opportunities for engaging with texts in a variety of new ways. However, while digital technologies open up new research horizons, it can be difficult for those starting off with these tools to know where to begin.

In this workshop, Godfried Croenen, an internationally recognised digital humanities expert at the University of Liverpool, will draw on his experience digitising the work of Jean Froissart, a prominent late-medieval chronicler, author and poet, for the Online Froissart to provide digital humanities scholars with a foundation to build from.

The workshop will introduce participants to the core principals and aims of text encoding for humanities research, and make them familiar with the theory and practice of text encoding using XML and the TEI (Text encoding initiative). It will contain presentations on the underlying theory as well as hands-on practical work on the encoding of texts.

Participants will work through a number of practical examples using different specialised tools (general editors, XML tools). At the end of the workshop participants will have acquired the necessary knowledge to think about ways of integrating text encoding into their own research and to start encoding texts in their own areas of interest.

Among other things, Godfried will show how these techniques, as in his own research, can be used to prepare transcriptions to be used for scholarly text editions, to record physical features of collections of textual documents, and to support research based on close readings of a corpus of historical or literary texts.

No advance specialist knowledge is needed. Participants who bring their own laptop will be advised on freely available software tools to install before the workshop.