XML DATABASES IN THE HUMANITIES

This course is for 2nd year students. It introduces to XML and TEI in the context of Digital Humanities technologies and practices, including theorical and practical notions of HTML, CSS, XSLT, XPath, text encoding and data modeling. We will create TEI, XSLT, XML and HTML+CSS samples.

By the end of the course the students will have acquired:

- the concepts of text encoding and markup, with their implications on data modeling and scholarly practice.
- basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, XML, TEI, XSLT, XPath.
- ability to apply this knowledge to create static web pages, XML and TEI contents and XSLT scripts.

Basic skills in using OS and applications.
Familiarity with textual criticism is not a requirement but is welcome.

The course will start with a short introduction about plain text digital encoding and the Unicode standard. It will then move to rich text and the concept of markup, distinguishing between presentational and semantic markup, through samples about typographic markup (e.g. RTF) and presentational web markup (HTML). HTML and its evolution will be used as a sample for realizing the capital difference between content and presentation in IT, also introducing CSS. The next logical step will be moving from presentation to content with the XML meta-language and its semantic markup, followed by a short introduction to TEI. Having thus attained the separation between content and its presentations, we will then see how the latter are generated from the former using technologies like XSLT or CSS for trivial cases. At this stage, reflecting on XML and its sister technologies like XSDL (actually an XML dialect, too) will lead us to introduce some essential concepts about text and data modeling in DH, from plain text to markup text, and its underlying structure. In fact, once we enter markup we enter structured data, which is what really makes a digital edition digital, rather than a digitized edition (just a replica of a paper edition using a different medium). The tree structure of DOM and XML will be introduced and discussed in relation with their advantages and disadvantages, while also hinting att their comparison with other complementary structures from technologies usually flanking XML in real-world DH projects (tables as in spreadsheets, relations as in RDBMS, objects as in NoSql databases, graphs as in RDF, etc.).
This theorical framework will be accompanied by practical exercises in HTML and CSS, XML and basic TEI, XSLT and XPath.

Online materials.

There will be regular assignments. The exam of the course will be a project about encoding a text with TEI and providing some basic presentation of it in HTML+CSS. Participants may at any time ask for a project by emailing daniele.fusi@unive.it. Once they receive the detailed instructions on the project, they have 14 days to submit the result.

Lessons will mix theory and practice as the course proceeds across its objectives. Active participation of the students is required. Attendance is recommended.

English

Non-attenders are requested to contact the teacher in order to organize their exercises in analogy to the attending students.

written