Hacking with TEI

Digital humanists, electronic publishers, and many others use the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines to mark up electronic texts, and over time have created a critical mass of XML — some conforming to subsets of the TEI Guidelines, some to individual customizations; in some cases intricate and dense, in others lean and expedient; some enriched with extensive external metadata, others with details marked explicitly in the text. The fruits of this labor are most often destined for display online or on paper (!), indexing, and more rarely, visualisation. Techniques of processing this markup beyond display and indexing are less well­understood and not accessible to the broad community of users, however, and programmers sometimes regard TEI XML as over­complex and hard to process.

Our intent in this hackathon/workshop is to further a practice­based enhancement of input, output, and processing of TEI XML by:

developing understanding and expertise of how to process TEI XML and get the best results from highly­marked up text resources;
experimenting with a wider range of applications, particularly in visualisation.
Participants
The workshop will attract reasonably experienced DH practitioners who have not hitherto experimented with TEI XML, and those who have already been using TEI and developing TEI tools. The workshop will aim at engaging participants in the development of tools or techniques which are based on community needs and will be publicized to eager users. They will be stimulated by others working on similar problems, and the results of the hands on collaboration at the workshop will be promoted to the DH community at large.

Participants will work together in a welcoming and participatory environment, with TEI and other technical experts (on hand and available remotely) to explain the intricacies of the TEI and its applications. Sample texts will be provided where necessary. Participants will work together in small teams.

Challenges
In addition to the posting of the workshop on the DH 2014 website, we will issue a call for participation by March 20th at the latest (shortly after the notice of this proposal acceptance). We will ask applicants to describe their skills and interests, and to propose a project for the hackathon. Once participants have been selected, we will set up a collaborative platform in the form of a wiki, and participants will be encouraged to comment on the proposed tasks and to propose new ones to tackle together during the workshop. A few projects will be selected by the group before the event. Tasks selected will be tuned to a range of skill sets. We will also requestsuggestions from the TEI community via its mailing lists.

Possible challenges might include but are not limited to:

mining a large corpus of texts for some data facet and visualising the results
rendering complex markup in an innovative and playful way
writing input or output filters for existing bits of software
extending existing TEI software to take advantage of external resources such as Zotero
adding a TEI mode to a web editor
applying visualisation to TEI documents or schemas (e.g. visualizing the TEI conceptual model)
Outline
Length: 1 Day

Morning:

09:00–10:00 introduction and coffee, finalise groups and challenges.
10:00–12:30 groups start work (break out sessions)
Lunch:

12:30–13:30 lunch and groups report on work so far
Afternoon:

13:30–16:00 group work continues (break out sessions)
16:00–17:30 regroup, report back and show work, plan for next steps, evaluation form
Follow up
Participants will have the option of applying for a $1000 grant from the Text Encoding Initiative to allow them to finish their work and make it available to others. Details for this competition will be provided after the workshop has taken place.

Organisers and TEI Experts
The organisers of this proposal all have extensive experience in leading and coordinating hands on workshops focused on TEI or related theories and technologies. They will be available during the workshop together with other TEI and DH experts who will be attending DH 2014 and confirmed interest to take part in this initiative should it be accepted by the programme committee:

Syd Bauman (Northeastern University, US ­ TEI council member, present) ­ expertise: TEI (including ODD), XSLT, RELAX NG, Schematron, Perl, bash
Hugh Cayless (Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing, Duke University, US ­ workshop organiser and TEI council member, remote) ­ expertise: document analysis, modelling, EpiDoc, XSLT, XML processing in various programming languages
Arianna Ciula (University of Roehampton, UK ­ workshop organiser and TEI board member, present) ­ expertise: document analysis, modelling, hybrid publications, TEI integration with semantic models
James Cummings (IT Services, University of Oxford, UK ­ TEI Technical Council Chair,) ­ expertise: TEI, XSLT, XQuery, basic jQuery
Alexander Czmiel (Berlin­Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Germany) ­ expertise: TEI, XSLT, XQuery, eXist, Digital Editions
Elli Mylonas (Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University ­ workshop organiser and TEI council member, present) ­ expertise: document analysis, modelling, experience with TEI users/encoder training, TEI workflows
Sebastian Rahtz (IT Services, University of Oxford, UK ­ workshop organiser and TEI council member, present) ­ expertise: processing TEI ODD specifications, ePub generation, and programming in XSL