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Registration: 4th Annual Workshop Series & Coding School (4/8/2016; 6/25-27/2016)

university_of_pittgreensburg

Join members of the Digital Mitford project team from Saturday June 25 through Monday June 27, 2016 for the Fourth Annual Workshop Series and Coding School, hosted by the newly established Center for the Digital Text at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. As featured on its public website, http://digitalmitford.org, the Digital Mitford project has two major purposes:

  • to produce the first comprehensive scholarly edition of the works and letters of Mary Russell Mitford
  • to share knowledge of TEI XML and related humanities computing practices with all serious scholars interested in contributing to the project
  • The editing team meets face-to-face to brush up on project methods and make major decisions, and participants and prospective new editors are invited to learn the team’s methods and think with them about project management challenges during the Coding School. Please join them if you want to learn text encoding methods and their applications in the Digital Humanities through hands-on participation in a large-scale digital archive project. The team will orient you to coding by giving you hands-on experience with literary and historical documents, from the careful encoding of markings on manuscript material to autotagging enormous and complicated texts with regular expression matching. And they invite you to think with them about how best to build a site interface and visualizations to help explore the data they are gathering on nineteenth-century networks of people, places, and texts.

    The workshops are held at the lovely Pitt-Greensburg campus, recently named one of the five most scenic college campuses near Pittsburgh. This year’s Coding School is part of a series of Digital Humanities events in the Pittsburgh area, as the organizers are coordinating it to follow immediately after the Keystone DH Conference (from June 22-24) in Pittsburgh. The editors will convene in the days preceding the conference, and the Coding School begins immediately afterwards. They expect people to arrive on Friday afternoon or evening June 24 and depart on Tuesday morning June 28, with the Coding School in session from Saturday morning June 25 through Monday afternoon June 27.

    Though they draw their active editors from researchers of 19th-century literature, they hope that all who join the Mitford project (whatever their primary research field) will find good resources for professional scholarly research and publication, and gain beneficial experience for individual projects. Joining the workshop leads to a free first-year membership in the Text Encoding Initiative, the international consortium establishing best practices for encoding of digital texts. They anticipate hosting two kinds of audiences:

  • those who wish to join the Mitford project as active editors
  • those who wish to learn the project’s methods to apply them to their own projects.
  • What is taught and shared:

  • Discussion of best practices for preparing digital scholarly editions as digital databases
  • Textual scholarship and paleography (working primarily with 19th-century manuscript correspondence)
  • Participation in an active “dig site” for important data on networks of women writers, theaters, and publishers from the 18th and 19th centuries
  • Hands-on learning of text encoding, including the following:
    • TEI XML encoding and best practices for project sustainability and longevity
    • Autotagging and regular expression matching to prepare digital texts
    • Hands-on experience with XPath, code schemas, XSLT, and an XML database
  • Perspective on project management and interface development as they work on developing their site interface
  • Individual and Group Instruction, working with their Explanatory Guides and Resources, organized and led by an elected member of the TEI Technical Council.
  • How to register:
    Send an e-mail to ebb8@pitt.edu by Friday April 8, 2016, indicating your interest in the Digital Mitford Coding School. A registration fee is required of all who are not actively affiliated as editors with the project:

  • Students, Adjunct Instructors, or Independent Scholars: $180
  • Full-Time Faculty Members and Librarians: $300
  • All registration fees are to be paid by check to the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, and are due by mail by May 16, 2015. Please mail checks to: The Digital Mitford Project, c/o Elisa Beshero-Bondar, U. of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, 150 Finoli Drive, Greensburg, PA 15601-5804. (Donations to the project above and beyond this amount are, of course, quite welcome.)

    Budgeting for the June 2016 Workshops:
    The project will cover the costs of residence in suites (with kitchens and good wireless internet) at the Pitt-Greensburg campus and will arrange for licenses for an extended (90-day) period to use their XML editing software. They cannot cover the costs of travel to Pitt-Greensburg, but they can and do coordinate rides from the Pittsburgh International Airport, the Latrobe regional airport, and the Amtrak train stations in Pittsburgh and in Greensburg. They ask each participant to investigate local funding sources to help cover the costs of travel.

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