Digital Humanities Summer School

MONDAY | Introduction and Digital Scholarly Editing

Digital Scholarly editing, theory and practice, HTR, XML

We will start the week with the theoretical background of digital scholarly editing and handwritten text recognition.

TUESDAY | Handwritten Text Recognition

Transkribus, TEI-XML

On the second day, we will recap what we have learned about HTR, and we will focus more specifically on the workflow in Transkribus. Then, we will do a creative exercise: writing a short story by hand. This will be the material to work with during the day as we will run the HTR model to 'transcribe' your own handwriting. In the end, we will export the results in TEI-XML.

WEDNESDAY | Keystroke Logging

Inputlog, keystroke logging, TEI-XML

On the third day, we will build upon the creative exercise of Tuesday: we will revise the short story on the computer and logging the writing process with a keystroke logger. We will then use these keystroke logging files to learn the basic technologies involved in making a (genetic) digital edition. As a first step, we will encode all the textual operations (e.g., new text production, additions, deletions) in TEI-XML together with the timestamps of each operation. These XML files will be used the next day as we move on to the visualisation of the reconstructions of the digital writing processes.

THURSDAY | eXist-db

eXist-db app, HTML, CSS

On the fourth day, we will learn the basics of working with eXist-db. After jointly installing eXist-db, we will use a pre-made eXist-db application, which can visualise the keystroke logging transcription. In the afternoon we will visit a museum.

FRIDAY | Visualising Manuscripts and Born-Digital Writing Processes

XPath, XSLT, HTML, CSS

On the last day, we will build upon what we have learned in the eXist-db session to visualise the writing process. We will learn the basics of XPath and XSLT as well as HTML and CSS, to make modifications to the existing visualisation. We will end the day with a final discussion.

Upon successful completion of the summer school course (including the preparatory assignment), students will be credited 3 ECTS — the certificates of which they can present to their home institutions. Students who wish to earn 6 ECTS instead, will receive an additional assignment that will be completed individually over the summer. In this assignment, students will be asked to apply what they learned to their own materials, and develop their own small-scale demo edition.

To include the credits in the curriculum at the home institution, participants need an agreement with the responsible person at the home institution.

A certificate will be awarded at the end of the programme.