L-70. XML in Action: Creating Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Texts
David Seaman
A practical exploration of the creation, preservation, and use of electronic texts and their associated images in the humanities, with a special focus on special collections materials.
This course is aimed primarily (although not exclusively) at librarians, publishers, and scholars keen to develop, use, publish, and control electronic texts for library, research, scholarly communication, or teaching purposes.
The week will center around the creation of a set of archival-quality etexts and digital images (probably 18th and 19th century letters, which are short enough to allow each participant to take an entire document through all its creation stages during the course).
Topics include: XML tagging and conversion; using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines; Unicode; metadata issues (including a discussion of METS and Open Archives Initiative harvesting), project planning and funding; and the manipulation of XML texts using stylesheets for re-publishing HTML, in ebook formats, and in PDF.
Applicants need to have some experience with the tagging of HTML documents. Further XML experience welcomed. In their personal statement, they should assess the extent of their present knowledge of the electronic environment, and outline a project to which they hope to apply the skills learned in this course.
Course History
Faculty
David Seaman
David Seaman is University librarian and dean of the Syracuse University Libraries. He was previously Associate Librarian for Information Management at Dartmouth College Library. Prior to his years at Dartmouth, he was Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), an international consortium of major academic libraries. David went to the DLF in July 2002 from the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library, where he was the Center’s founding Director (1992–2002). In this role, he oversaw the creation of online texts, images, and e-books, and helped develop scholarly communities who make innovative use of these new materials and tools. David has lectured and published extensively in the fields of humanities computing and digital libraries, and has taught various Special Collections digitization and XML courses at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia since 1993.
Courses Formerly Offered
- L-70. XML in Action: Creating Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Texts (1994–2015 under various titles)
- L-75. Electronic Texts in XML (2002 & 2004, with Matthew Gibson and Christine Ruotolo)
- Introduction to the Internet (1994–1995)
- Electronic Formats in a Rare Books Environment (1993, with John Price-Wilkin & Christie Stephenson)