DIGITAL TEXTS – ONLINE ONLY

Workshop abstract

This strand will showcase a range of methods and approaches to texts in the Digital Humanities. It will focus on introducing and explaining these techniques and providing examples of projects and research that use them. Topics covered will include a variety of TEI applications, various approaches to text analytics, automated transcription and an exploration of the different forms of textual information available form study. The aim is to help you understand the breadth of the field and identify technqiues relevant to your research interests that you can explore further.

Learning objectives

Understand the breadth of text formats and techniques in the Humanties. 

Critically evaluate which formats, tools and techniques might be appropriate to your research requirements.

Have exposure to research projects which demonstrate these tools in action.

Course level

Beginners – no coding experience necessary.

Convenors

Megan Gooch

Megan is the Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship and Digital Humanities Support, working in both the Bodleian Libraries and Division of Humanities. Her interests in Digital Humanities are in data curation and analysis and in supporting research, teaching and impact in digital scholarship.

She has previously worked in the museums and heritage sector as a curator at the British Museum and various curatorial and public engagement roles at Historic Royal Palaces. Her recent research and professional practice have focused on public engagement with digital cultural heritage, and she was the Leadership Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded project Lest We Forget: Poppies and Public Commemoration. Megan’s PhD was in early medieval numismatics, and she still maintains a strong interest in coins and medals and in supporting the numismatic community.

Neil Jefferies

Neil Jefferies is Head of Innovation for Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services at Oxford. He is a scientist by training but has been working with internet technologies for nearly 20 years, mostly commercially – his first website was Snickers/Euro’96. He is PI and Community Lead for SWORDV3, a protocol for machine-to-machine transfer of digital objects, a co-author of the Oxford Common File Layout for preservation-oriented object storage and Technical Strategist for “Cultures of Knowledge”, an international collaborative project to “reconstruct the correspondence and social networks of the early modern period”. Previously, he was also a co-creator of the International Image Interoperability Framework.

Neil Jefferies was involved with the initial setup of the Eprints and Fedora Repositories at Oxford and is now working on the development of future library-related technologies and services. Neil is Technical Strategist of the Cultures of Knowledge project, and PI of the Unlocking Digital Texts project. He was a founding co-author of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), a co-author of the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) for preserving versioned digital objects, and community lead for the SWORD protocol for moving digital objects between systems. Neil has served on the organising committees of international conferences such Open Repositories, DPASSH, The Preservation and Archiving SIG and ILIDE, and teaches regular sessions on a variety of topics at the Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School.

Workshop programme

Monday 3rd July

14:00 – 15:00: Introducing Digital Texts

Introducing the strand with a discussion of the diversity of textual forms and approaches, and the consequent need for a variety of technqiues and tools.

Speakers: Neil Jefferies, Head of Innovation, Open Scholarship Support, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

15:00 – 16:00: What are Digital Editions and Why?

This talk will consider what the migration of critical editions to digital platforms offers the researcher; the relationship between the digital as a replication of the print edition and the status of the digital edition; how digital resources can enhance scholarly work and what the challenges are for electronic scholarly editors in an editorial environment that is more fluid than bibliographic editing; and why dynamic databases can enable a more collaborative critical engagement of reader with editor than has been possible previously.

Speakers: Professor Andrew Kahn is the Academic Editor of EE and Professor of Russian Literature in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Literatures, Oxford.

16:00 – 17:00: The Harriot Papers: Transcribing De infinitis

This case study draws from a workshop that the University of Notre Dame hosted to transcribe the De infinitis (On Infinity), a manuscript treatise by early modern English polymath Thomas Harriot. In this session exploring the making of The Harriot Papers, the organizers will outline current practices, workflows, and future designs related to collaborative scholarly transcription endeavors, also known as transcribathons. Transcribing De infinitis allowed international scholars, joining both in person and online, to collaborate live on selected manuscript pages in a digital format – a democratic and organic process in which questions about Harriot’s manuscripts emerged in their contexts and informed the computational and editorial strategies used to represent those ideas. Making original use of widely available tools such as Notion and Google Jamboard, collaborators produced a sample of machine-readable text, while developing a set of editorial decision-making practices. At the same time, interpreting Harriot’s references to the history of mathematics and literature advanced knowledge of mathematical and philosophical concepts of the infinite found in English and multilingual sources.

Tuesday 4th July

14:00 – 15:00: Bringing large cultural heritage text collections online for scholarly use.

This presentation will show and discuss examples of how large text collections from Dutch cultural heritage institutions are processed, automatically enriched and unlocked for scholarly online use. Cases discussed will include a heterogenous text corpus of 20 billion words for diachronic linguistic research (Nederlab), but also the complete set of 17th and 18th century Resolutions of the Dutch StatesGeneral from the Dutch National Archive, that are currently made available as online collection for historical research.

Speaker: Hennie Brugan, Lead Developer at the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

15:00 – 16:00: Fihrist – Pioneering a collaborative manuscript catalogue in TEI

A synopsis on the making of Fihrist – a union catalogue of manuscripts from the Islamicate World, from it’s first attempts of modelling manuscript data in TEI to its build-up into a union catalogue and a continuing inspiration in the field.

Speaker: Yasmin Faghihi Head of Near and Middle Eastern Department Manuscripts and Printed Collections Cambridge University Library.

16:00 – 17:00: The Quill Project

The Quill Project works to research the history and enhance understanding of some of the world’s foundational legal texts. The Quill Project works to research the history and enhance understanding of some of the world’s foundational legal texts.

Speaker: Nicholas Cole, Director, The Quill Project.

Wednesday 5th July

09:00 – 10:00: Introduction to Text Encoding Initiative 

ABSTRACT – TBC

Speaker: Dr Katarzyna Anna Kapitan www.kakapitan.com is manuscript scholar and digital humanist specialising in Nordic literature and book history. She is Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, University of Oxford, where she works on her most recent project “Virtual Library of Torfæus”, a digital book-historical project funded by the Carlsberg Foundation.

10:00 – 11:00: TEI, Transcription and Transmission, part I

This session will give a practical insight into the considerations that go into creating a digital edition. What elements of a text are important? What should you transcribe, and how? How do you encode a text using TEI and why? Who are you encoding a text for and how do you ensure it meets the needs of your intended audience? This session will include practical exercises on TEI encoding and participants will be given the opportunity to encode a short text themselves as part of the session.

Speaker: This session will give a practical insight into the considerations that go into creating a digital edition. What elements of a text are important? What should you transcribe, and how? How do you encode a text using TEI and why? Who are you encoding a text for and how do you ensure it meets the needs of your intended audience? This session will include practical exercises on TEI encoding and participants will be given the opportunity to encode a short text themselves as part of the session.

11:00 – 12:00 : TEI, Transcription and Transmission, part II

This session will give a practical insight into the considerations that go into creating a digital edition. What elements of a text are important? What should you transcribe, and how? How do you encode a text using TEI and why? Who are you encoding a text for and how do you ensure it meets the needs of your intended audience? This session will include practical exercises on TEI encoding and participants will be given the opportunity to encode a short text themselves as part of the session.

Speaker: Emma Huber is a Subject Librarian and a Digital Humanist with a particular interest in digital editing. She created the Taylor Editions project https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/ which offers a free online training course on Digital Editing and the TEI.

Thursday 6th July

09:00 – 10:00: Unlocking the Simon Forman’s and Richard Napier’s Casebooks

The Casebooks Project, funded by the Wellcome Trust and completed in 2019, encoded detailed metadata and excerpted transcriptions of the 80,000 medical records of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, arguably the most popular astrologer-physicians of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Their casebooks form the period’s richest surviving set of medical records, providing invaluable insight into not only their medical practices but also the everyday lives and sufferings of the 60,000 people, from servants to noblemen, children to the elderly, who consulted them. At least 90% of the questions asked concerned health and disease. The remainder covered topics as diverse as marriage, employment, travel plans, theft, missing persons and even witchcraft. We faced many challenges encoding these records, such as how to model the complex interactions between the practitioners and their clients when no individual – including Forman and Napier – had ever read the entire collection because it is so vast. Unlocking Digital Texts (AHRC/NEH) will make these records more accessible than ever by allowing users to construct and annotate detailed narratives of the cases that interest them whether for exploring a single family’s generational history, Forman’s troubled love life or understandings of witchcraft and the supernatural.

Speaker: Michael Hawkins, Senior Developer, Digital Innovation, Cambridge University Library.

10:00 – 11:00:  IIIF as a Basis for the Textual Analysis of Historical Prints

Abstract: TBC

Speaker: Ina Serif, Researcher, University of Basel.

11:00 – 12:00: Digital Voltaire: from archival edition to digital resource

In 2022, the Voltaire Foundation published the final volume in its prestigious Complete Works of Voltaire series – a 205 volume, 50+ year project to publish the entirety of the corpus of one of the most prolific writers of the eighteenth century in a critical edition which aimed for the highest scholarly standards. Our challenge now is to transform this achievement into an authoritative and highly flexible digital humanities resource, which aims to combine the experience and intellectual heritage of the archival project, but leveraging the very latest digital software developments. In this session, I will outline the scope of the project, talk about some of the challenges that we have faced so far, and decisions that have been made. I also hope to be able to present some work in progress visualisations of the resource, and discuss some of the ways in which the project might develop in the future.

Friday 7th July 

09:00 – 10:00 –

10:00 – 11:00 -Text Mining Publications

Abstract: TBC

Speaker:  Peter Cornwell is research fellow at ENS-Lyon and Professor at IMCC-Westminster. He is also currently European co-chair of the Research Data Alliance Preservation Tools Technologies and Policies Group and a director of Data Futures GmbH.

11:00 – 12:00 – Critically evaluating tools & techniques

Choosing the correct approach for your data can have a significant impact on the success, or otherwise, of your research, and this talk will encourage you to critically evaluate all standards and practices much as you would evaluate your scholarly sources.

Speaker: Neil Jefferies, Head of Innovation, Open Scholarship Support, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Application Link: https://web.cvent.com/event/58fc430e-5294-4919-a7a3-c2b14f81a059/websitePage:f410d299-f6a9-41d0-aa8a-c06df7615b87