Standards for digital encoding

Summary: The course addresses digital encoding of language resources, such as corpora, lexica, or complex digital editions. This area is becoming increasingly important due to the growing size and variety of "digital language" and its potential for interchange and exploitation, and concerns both humanities computing and human language technologies. The course concentrates on the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines and their application, as well as introcuding XSLT. Examples studied include annotated multilingual corpora, dictionaries, and complex digital editions. Lectures are accompanied by hands-on sessions. The course should enable students to understand, produce, and use TEI encoded texts of various types and for various purposes.

Related course: Annotating language data

Timetable "Standards for digital encoding" 2006/2007

Lectures and lab sessions are on Fridays 9am-2pm (5 x 45 minutes + breaks). Consultations are in the breaks between the lectures or by appointment.

Week	Date	Topics	Lecture materials	Lab session	Assignment
1	3/11/06	Background: XML, Namespaces, XPath	Lecture (XML): Slides: slides.ppt, handout.pdf ESSLLI course: The XML Recommendation XML Namespaces XPath J.Cummings: Introduction to XPath Burnard, Driscoll, Rahtz: Digital Texts, XML, and TEI (TEI Training Course, Sofia 2005)	Introduction to Oxygen XML editor: making a valid XML document, exercises with XPath.
2	10/11/06	Introduction to TEI: motivation, history, structure of documents	Slides: slides.ppt, handout.pdf Burnard, Driscoll, Rahtz: TEI overview (TEI Training Course, Sofia 2005) Erjavec: ESSLII 2005 "Annotation of Language Resources", Lecture II. XML-Related Recommendations: Formatting and Transforming XML	Marking up a text in TEI Lite, basic XSLT transforms	Assignment 1
3	17/11/06	TEI structure: architecture and parameterisation of P5, textual criticism	L. Burnard: TEI architecture (from Workshop on Development of Skills in Advanced Text Encoding with TEI P5) M. J. Driscoll: Encoding text-critical editions (from TEI Training, Sofia, October 2005)	An exercise with Roma (local)	Information on student projects
4	24/11/06	TEI and corpora: intro to computer corpora, TEI encoding of linguistic analyses, the TEI header	Slides: slides.ppt, handout.pdf Slides (partialy) based on the talk: Lou Burnard, Using XML for Linguistic Annotation	XSLT excercises: making an index, pointers	Assignment 2
5	1/12/06	Wrap-up: linking, ODD, TEI bits and bobs	Selected talks from TEI workshops at Brown University, August 2006 and Oxford, September 2006: Syd Bauman:Linking Syd Bauman & Julia Flanders:Customization Lou Burnard: Publishing Julia Flanders:Participating	Dealing with pointers ODD in the guidelines using TEI2HTML stylesheets tei-l	Project presentations

Assesment and Due Dates

The course score is computed on the basis of:

• Assignments (30%): two assignments, to be handed in one, max. two weeks after receiving the assignment.
• Project (70%): composed of the practical work + written report, formatted as a usual conference paper. The project work is to be presented at the last lecture (1.12.2006) and the report handed in by the end of the term (1.2.2007), at the latest.

Reading materials

The course materials are heavily based on the following sources, by Syd Bauman, Lou Burnard, Matthew Driscoll, Julia Flanders, and Sebastian Rahtz:

• TEI: an Overview. TEI Day in Kyoto, July 2006
• TEI Training. Sofia, October 2005
• Workshop on Development of Skills in Advanced Text Encoding with TEI P5, September 18-20 2006
• Text Encoding Fundamentals and their Application. University of Victoria, June 2006
• Intensive Introduction to TEI. Brown University, August 2006

Thanks to all the people who have put work in preparing the above materias, special thanks for making them available on the web, and a very special <thanks>thanks for allowing others to teach by them!</thanks>

Useful links:

• TEI home page
• A Gentle Introduction to XML, TEI Lite
• TEI P4 / Pizza Chef
• TEI P5 / Roma
• The TEI visualiser
• W3C: XML, XPath, XSLT
• Unicode, Character encoding tutorial

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