Fall 2022 Semester Project

Semester project overview

Your task is to collaborate on a team to create a small digital edition that represents a source document (or collection 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  • historical references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 that you will share with a group of students working as a project team. Part of this project is curating and documenting your code in the repo, and part of it involves publishing your work 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 to make decisions about how to create a web exhibit of your documents as you are learning to process and transform your XML in this course.

Each group shares its code in a team GitHub repository for the project. You will be preparing a website from this GitHub repository using GitHub Pages, which will make a research exhibit of the document(s). 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

Review the following options to work on for the semester project. Then visit our Google Doc sign-up sheet to indicate your first, second, and third choices.

• A. Behrend Archives Options for the 75th Anniversary of Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
  (Visit Lilley Library 13 to inspect these in person)
  1. The founding of Penn State Erie (1940s and 50s): letters and notes
     Let's compile a list of people and organizations to reference and highight in these documents.
     Which people, businesses, other organizations were involved? What events, technologies, courses of study, etc. were of interest to them?
  2. A selection of Mary and Ernst Behrend’s (mostly typewritten) travel letters from Europe, 1950s (multiple projects possible):
     When and where did they travel, and what did they experience?
• B. Online facsimile options
  1. Harlem Renaissance Anthology: Joint project with Framingham State U.
     We need a team interested in African American poetry and possibly music.
     We'll help customize a schema and transform portions of The New Negro anthology edited by Alain Locke 1925) on the Internet Archive (example passage with music here) to make a web edition.
     We have a text transcript already, but we need to help clean it up for coding. A little music encoding of short pieces (like this story + tune of Br'er Rabbit) and output to .midi or .wav sound files is possible.
  2. Picture book: encoding text and images, tracking motifs: Hilaire Belloc, illustrated Cautionary Tales for Children
  3. Picture book: encoding text and images, tracking motifs (late-breaking option): Alice's Adventures Underground, illustrated by the author (Lewis Carroll) This is Lewis Carroll's earliest form of the Alice in Wonderland novel, and the illustrations were made by him.
  4. Picture book: encoding text and images, tracking motifs (late breaking option): Mary Gilbert, or, A peep at the elephant : with elegant engravings, published 1833 A children's book from 1833 about a child's encounter with an elephant, with discussion of large animals.
  5. Contribute to Dr. B’s Digital Mitford project: Mary Russell Mitford's journal typescript:
     • Continue coding an existing TEI XML file, consulting the typescript (and occasionally checking the original handwritten journal with Dr. B where the transcript raises questions)
     • Work with our ready-made Digital Mitford project customization of the TEI