Fall 2020 Semester Project

Semester project overview

Your task is to create a small digital edition that represents a source document (or set of source documents) in a way that helps make data and metadata visible and available to explore as an exhibit on the world-wide web. Your project will involve making decisions to mark up the document(s) in XML according to a schema that you define either in Relax NG, or (with consultation) a TEI ODD. Your XML markup can be one or or multiple files. It should engage with information you determine to be meaningful and important to illuminate for a wider audience. This should include:

• Information about the document:
  • its original source(s) and media format(s)
  • source of the document image you are working with
  • the condition of the document or document imaging
  • identifications of people, organizations, places, dates, events, phenomena mentioned or referenced
  • related texts or media
• Document structure (one or more of the following):
  • line-groups and lines in poems or music lyrics, for example
  • sections and subsections, paragraphs, perhaps sentences
  • questions and answers on a survey form
  • layout of pages, pagination
• Data you think is worth marking, collecting, organizing, studying, assessing in the document text, such as:
  • language patterns of any kind that interest you
  • historical references
  • places: mappable or fictional or mythical
  • references to other texts
  • mentions of people, organizations, events, phenomena
• Information about the text encoding you are creating:
  • your role as editor
  • your context for editing: our class, university, and semester context

You will be preparing your project files in a GitHub repository, starting with your own repository, and then eventually sharing with a repository for the group of students working on a project option. Part of this project is curating and documenting your code in the repo, and part of it involves publishing to a website hosted on the repo using GitHub Pages and HTML and CSS code that you write yourself as you learn these units in our course.

Your encoding of this text will involve some decision making and investigation of a research question that you can help to answer using systematic XML markup. You will transform your XML with XSLT into HTML and style it to prepare a web exhibit of the document that is more than just a reading view, but is designed to share information and contexts you have learned about the text with a wider audience.

You have a choice of documents to work with. Based on your choices, groups of you will form a small community that will be producing a range of web exhibits on this text as you are learning to process and transform your XML in this course. Each group is to review its code and share it in a team GitHub repository associated with your text. You will be preparing a website from this GitHub repository using GitHub Pages, which will make a research exhibit of the document. Your team may opt to represent alternative distinct exhibits of the document based on your distinct approaches. Each student is expected to prepare markup and write to a schema individually by a set due date in November. Then as we work on XSLT transformations, coordinate with your group to compare your markup, prepare a shared team GitHub repository, and to prepare and style the most interesting or remarkable transformations in a web exhibit using GitHub Pages.

Source document options

Choose one of the following options to work on for the semester project. Then visit our Google Doc sign-up sheet to indicate your choice.

1. Complete encoding of Anna Julia Cooper’s survey responses to the Survey of Negro College Graduates that we began in the TEI unit. Work with the ODD-generated schema we prepared and the code structure that the class formalized, and prepare a complete edition to be a web exhibit. Related helpful resources:
   • published edition of her long answer to question 65: See item 17.
   • biographical sketch of Anna Julia Cooper
   • context on the survey and her response
2. A short typescript children’s Christmas play set in World War I by Anna Julia Cooper. (See whole AJC collection)
3. The Ballot and Me (short typescript play by Langston Hughes)
4. Selection of poems, or whole collection: Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes. Option: work with manuscript draft images
5. Dracula: You've regexed it into an XML document. Now try locating and marking some phenomena of interest through this novel, such as locations
6. First proof page of Dharma Bums: as Jack Kerouac wanted it vs. how Viking Press edited it: Published version. (Or work on some section of the published text after regexing it to make XML.)