Text Encoding June 2020

Text Encoding for Ancient and Modern Literature, Languages and History

June 2, 5 & 8, 2020

Tutors: Jonathan Blaney, Gabriel Bodard, Christopher Ohge, Naomi Wells

• This online workshop will use a mix of real-time and asynchronous teaching to introduce participants to a range of practices and issues in text encoding and annotation. We will work hands-on with HTML and Markdown or “Wikitext” encoding, and the Recogito annotation platform, and discuss the theory and context of text encoding in academic research and editing. We will mention XML and TEI but not work hands-on with this more complex form of text encoding.

Thank you for registering for the Text Encoding for Ancient and Modern Literature, Languages and History workshop jointly run by the ICS, IES, IHR and IMLR at the University of London. This training will be offered over three separate short meetings at 3pm (UK time), on Tuesday and Friday next week and the following Monday. It is essential that you commit to attending all three sessions, and to doing at least a couple of hours of preparation and practice between the sessions; there will also be group work and discussion.

In preparation for the first session on Tuesday, please download and install the Atom text editor (https://atom.io/) in the version appropriate to your operating system, and then install the 'Markdown Preview Enhanced' package.

• Mac: click on Atom > Preferences > +Install and type 'markdown-preview-enhanced' in the Search packages box.

• Windows: click on File > Settings > +Install and type 'markdown-preview-enhanced' in the Search packages box

For the Friday session you will also want to have created an account on the Recogito website (https://recogito.pelagios.org/).

We will provide you by email with the link and password to the Zoom channel in which the sessions will take place. You will also be provided with some online tutorials (video or text) to view after the first session, some optional readings, and details of an exercise to complete before the Friday session. For the feedback and discussion, we will use an online discussion forum, to which you will all be invited. You may unsubscribe from the forum at the end of the workshop or at any time.

Videos and Tutorials

Markdown and HTML

• Introduction to markup and text encoding
  • Video: What is Markup, and a Brief History.
  • Download the slideshow.
• Markdown tutorial
  • Video: A Markdown Primer, and Available Tools.
  • (Optional) Video: Live Markdown Demo.
• HTML tutorial
  • Video: HTML as Markup.
• Markdown cheatsheet
• W3Schools HTML tutorial

Exercise 1

1. Download the page of Alexander Pope's Dunciad here.
2. Confer with your partner on the document--discuss some of the challenges, what you would like to represent, and how.
3. Either individually or in consultation with your partner, encode the page in Markdown in the Atom text editor. (Hint: start with transcription and basic text structure first.)
4. Preview the encoded page in the Atom text editor.
5. Open the html rendering of the file in Atom.

Annotation and Recogito

• Recogito video tutorial from Sunoikisis Digital Classics (start at 56:00 for c.25 minutes)
• Recogito tutorial from Pelagios

Discussion questions

Using the Google forum to which you have all been invited, please discuss the following questions with the other participants and instructors. You may use the forum as a web interface, or set up your account as an email list, either works fine.

Session 1: Markup

1. Is Markdown or HTML better suited to encoding this example? (Is there any difference?)
2. What might we want to be able to encode in this text that Markdown/HTML doesn’t allow?
3. What features might you want to add that are only possible in the digital medium?
4. Do you think you have to sacrifice display for semantics? (Or vice versa?)
5. Who is the imagined audience of your web page? Does that affect the decisions you made?

Session 2: Annotation

1. Questions tba