WWP Seminars on Scholarly Text Encoding

As part of its outreach activities the Women Writers Project teaches workshops and seminars in scholarly text encoding. The goal of this initiative is two-fold: first, to provide humanities faculty and students with an opportunity to examine the significance of text encoding as a scholarly practice, through a combination of discussion and practical experimentation. And second, to provide supporting resources for humanities researchers who want to experiment with text encoding on their own, or would like to start or become involved with a digital research project. The resources and events listed below are all aimed at faculty, students, and practitioners in the humanities who have little or no technical experience but are interested in digital textuality. In addition to providing support in grappling with the technical topics, these resources also engage with the scholarly issues that surround these technologies.

We also offer regular workshops on text encoding, focused on the more practical and technical aspects of working with the TEI.

Advanced seminars

In 2008, we received a grant from the NEH Institutes in Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities to support a series of advanced seminars on special topics in scholarly text encoding, building on our two-year introductory seminar series (described below). This program will support six seminars between July 2009 and June 2011.

The advanced seminar series focuses on two topics:

Manuscript encoding: These workshops will focus on the detailed challenges of encoding manuscript materials, including editorial, transcriptional, and interpretive issues and the methods of representing these in TEI markup.
Contextual information: These workshops will focus on TEI methods for formalizing and representing information about context: named entities such as people and places, thematic analysis and keywords, text classification, glossaries and annotations.

Each topic will be offered several times at different locations during the course of the grant; please see the seminar schedule for details.

These seminars are intended to provide a more in-depth look at specific encoding problems and topics for people who are already involved in a text encoding project or are in the process of planning one. Each event will include a mix of presentations, discussion, case studies using participants' projects, hands-on practice, and individual consultation. The seminars will be strongly project-based: participants will present their projects to the group, discuss specific challenges and encoding strategies, develop encoding specifications and documentation, and create encoded sample documents and templates. Participants will be expected to prepare some work in advance of the workshop, and to share completed sample documents with other participants following its completion. We encourage project teams and collaborative groups to apply, although individuals are also welcome. A basic knowledge of the TEI Guidelines and some prior experience with text encoding (e.g. an introductory workshop, job experience, etc.) will be assumed. If you're in doubt about whether you have the requisite expertise, please contact us for more information.

Travel funding is available of up to $500 per participant.

Application form

Seminar schedule

For more information, please contact us at WWP@brown.edu.

Introductory seminars

In 2006 we received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a two-year program of workshops and seminars on text encoding, aimed specifically at humanities faculty, held at humanities centers across the US during 2007-2009. Funding for these seminars came from the NEH, the WWP, and the hosting institutions. We would like to express our particular gratitude to the organizers of these events, for their enthusiasm and generosity that made these such a success.

Support and consultation

No matter how engaging these seminars prove to be, they cannot answer all the questions that will arise and they cannot in themselves make it possible for participants to become confident, engaged critics, creators, and leaders of digital text projects. To ensure that the interests and ideas arising from the seminars receive ongoing support, this program also supports a number of activities and resources intended to provide longer-term advice and consultation, as well as a place where participants and others interested in the field can go to find out more. These include:

project consultation for participants who are thinking about starting or getting involved with a digital project
advice on writing grant proposals for digital text projects
support in creating TEI schemas and customizations
advice on digital editing, authoring, and publication
information on staffing, funding, project management
the opportunity to ask questions of any kind: we welcome them all

If you have participated in a WWP seminar and you'd like to get advice or information, please contact us at WWP@brown.edu. Even if you haven't attended a WWP seminar, please feel free to write—we may be able to help and we'll be happy to try.

Resources

What is the TEI? Basic information for those starting from scratch
Sample curricula
Readings
WWP Guide to Scholarly Text Encoding