The Literature and Digital Humanities Working Group would like to present the following talk as a follow up to 'Editions Inside of Archives: Literary Editing and Preservation at the Mark Twain Project' (Christopher Ohge). It will be of particular interest to those interested in producing online editions or archives of historical and literary materials.
XML is a standard from which many encoding languages are created, and it structures much of the data on the Internet. XML is a language of the web (as HTML); it is widely used in mapping and geographic information systems (as KML, the language of Google Maps and Google Earth); it is the basis of TEI, a set of archival standards for the creation and preservation of electronic texts; and Databases using XML are becoming increasingly popular, especially for use with historical and literary materials. Ubiquitous in computing and relatively easy to learn, XML is a fundamental skill and a powerful way of describing, manipulating, and presenting data and text.
For this talk, Scott McGinnis will present some of the ways that XML can be used in historical and literary research, drawing on his own experience in the study of early Chinese historical narratives and in creating digital editions and scholarly websites. This talk will be followed by a three-part workshop series on XML, to be held in D-Lab, October 20, 27, and November 3, from 12:00 to 3:00pm (free of charge).
Scott Paul McGinnis is a PhD candidate in History and a GSR for DH at Berkeley and D-Lab. He is in the process of creating a digital edition of an early Chinese historical work, the first-century Han shu, in collaboration with the Mark Twain Project and with support from the DH at Berkeley initiative. He has taught several DH workshops at D-Lab, and he co-teaches a course on XML at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria. He has been a site developer on English Professor Scott Saul's scholarly website, Richard Pryor's Peoria, and he worked as a digital projects assistant at the Washington University Digital Library.
