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: Introduction to Human Language Technologies

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Timetable "Standards for digital encoding" 2007/2008

Lectures and lab sessions are on Fridays 9.30 - 12.30 (3 x 45 minutes + breaks). Consultations are in the breaks between the lectures or by appointment.

Week	Date	Topics	Lecture materials	Lab session	Assignment
1	9/11/07	Discussion			Excerices
2	16/11/07	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 (recipes), exercises with XPath.
3	23/11/07	Introduction to TEI: motivation, history, structure of documents	Slides: slides.ppt, handout.pdf Burnard, Driscoll, Rahtz: TEI overview (TEI Training Course, Sofia 2005)	Marking up a text in TEI Lite, basic XSLT transforms
4	30/11/07	TEI: namespaces, Roma	Roma	Transforming documents into TEI Student presentations: areas of interest
5	7/12/07	The TEI class system	L. Burnard: TEI architecture (from Workshop on Development of Skills in Advanced Text Encoding with TEI P5)	Student presentations: presentation of materials
6	14/12/07	Modifying the TEI	Using TEI P5 TEI P5 Infrastructure Roma	Student presentations: TEI encodings
7	11/1/08	TEI stylesheets	XSLT Stylesheets for TEI Stylebear	Student 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 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 P5 / Roma
• W3C: XML, XPath, XSLT
• Unicode, Character encoding tutorial

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