Week 1-4 Recap & Intro to XML and TEI
Humanties Data : A necessary contradiction
At a Harvard Purdue Data Management Symposium, Miriam Posner introduced her view on how digital humanists view, think about, and engage with data compared to other scholars like social scientists. At this symposium, she shared her experience on what exactly it means to work with data as a digital humanist and the ways in which libraries can assist. Posner claimed that because digital humanists are so deeply involved in collecting their source material (data) that this helps them to be better aware of any subtle difference that occurs when interpreting it. She further explained why digital humanists are able to create visualizations without data. That's because they tend to illustrate ideas and movements and not data points. Posner mentioned that Humanists are in constant need of some help when managing their data and so that's where the role of libraries comes into action. That is because the metadata in spreadsheets, videos, images, etc usually comes from libraries.
- Introduction to Text encoding and XML
Furthermore, I was introduced to a critical component of Digital Humanities – Text Encoding. As a part of this topic, I was also introduced to Digital Projects, XML, TEI, EAD, and ways to present XML documents. This research commenced with an introduction to Digital projects. This can be defined as the transformation of objects that are of scholarly interest. In order to better understand it, I needed to learn exactly what are objects of scholarly interests are. They include texts and images in electronic form that will be used for enhanced or remote analysis. In order to create a digital project, one must plan, prepare and produce electronic publications. I learned that I use these electronic publications on a daily purpose for both research and non-research purposes since they take up the form of websites, electronic books, and digital images. Digital projects have many benefits including the preservation and prevention of fragile material by displaying it online and allowing people to access information online that would otherwise be unavailable among many other benefits. Surprisingly, I found out that the materials to create a digital project are already in my possession or at my disposal: material to encode, a computer with a text editor, and software to process the encoding. However, when creating a Digital Project, one should take into consideration things like copyright issues, availability of materials needed for encoding, the goal of the project, and the intended audience.
To code text, one must transfer the materials to a text editor, markup the document with tags and elements, validate the document and present it via the World Wide Web or any other interface. To begin learning how to use XML, I had to become familiar with the terms associated with it like tags, elements, and attributes as well as the XML rules.
TEI is used to organize text into a “document tree.” This tree structure makes it possible to search a TEI document and apply stylesheets for a display to the user. TEI documents have a basic set of tags which makes the document very unique since these tags are specific to what is being encoded. To visually present a TEI encoded document, one must use a style sheet or some conversion program. This is where XSLT's extensible stylesheet language for transformation comes into play. XSLT was specifically developed to transform XML encoded documents into new formats. In order for an XML document to reach its greatest potential, it must be transformed by an XSLT stylesheet. This is because XML tells the document what it is, but not what to do, while the stylesheet provides the document with the instructions about how to be displayed. The XSLT stylesheet tells the XML document how to function. Stylesheets permit the markup language to be suppressed from the public for viewing. Going into this reading, I had no idea about the topic, however, after the reading, I found it relatively easy to create my first web page using XML.