DH2014Hackathon

Call for Participation
We are inviting applications to participate in the TEI Hackathon Workshop that will be held on July 7, 2014, as a pre-conference session at DH2014 (http://dh2014.org/).

Digital humanists, librarians, publishers, and many others use the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines to mark up electronic texts, and over time have created a critical mass of XML — some conforming to known subsets of the TEI Guidelines, some to individual customizations; in some cases intricate and dense, in others lean and expedient; some enriched with extensive external metadata, others with details marked explicitly in the text. The fruits of this labor are most often destined for display online or on paper (!), indexing, and more rarely, visualisation. Techniques of processing this markup beyond display and indexing are less well-understood and not accessible to the broad community of users, however, and programmers sometimes regard TEI XML as over-complex and hard to process.

What We’ll Do
The goal of the hackathon is to make significant progress on a few projects during one day of work (from 9am to roughly 5.30pm).

Possible projects might include but are not limited to:
 * applying visualisation to TEI documents or schemas/ODDs (e.g. visualizing the TEI conceptual model)
 * mining a large corpus of texts for some data facet and visualising the results
 * rendering complex markup in an innovative and playful way
 * writing input or output filters for existing bits of software
 * extending existing TEI software to take advantage of external resources such as Zotero
 * adding a TEI mode to a web editor
 * Programming for multilingual resources

All participants will begin discussing the projects that have been proposed before the hackathon, and select a small number to be worked on. More concrete discussion about tools and specs will take place before the date of the hackathon so participants can hit the ground running during the hackathon. On the day of the hackathon, participants will form groups, and work on their projects. Workshop organizers and invited experts will be on hand to consult on TEI details and strategies of dealing with them.

The organisers will provide refreshments during the day, will make sample texts available if needed, and will help with software setup where possible. Participants will need to bring their own laptop computers

Participants
This workshop is intended for reasonably experienced DH practitioners, who may not hitherto have experimented with TEI XML, as well as those who have already been using TEI and developing TEI tools. If you don’t fall into either of these categories, but you have a project that is appropriate for the hackathon, please apply or contact us directly.

Application process
Applicants will email their application with the following information to hackathon@tei-c.org. Deadline: Midnight (EST) April 17 (applications received after this date will be considered on a rolling basis only if space remains available) Notification: by April 30
 * Name
 * Affiliation
 * Contact information (email)
 * Skills and experience (to help select projects)
 * One or two suggested projects. These don’t have to be described in great detail, as they will be discussed and shaped further in June.

The selection will be carried out by the programme committee based on variety of expertise, interest in challenges with broad application, geographical and gender balance.

Organizers and Experts
Please don’t hesitate to contact the organizers if you have any questions.

Programme committee:

 * 'Hugh Cayless (hugh.cayless@duke.edu) : TEI Technical Council - Research programmer for the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing
 * Arianna Ciula (ariananciula@roehampton.ac.uk) : TEI Board of Directors - Research Facilitator (Humanities) at the University of Roehampton
 * James Cummings (james.cummings@it.ox.ac.uk) : TEI Technical Council (chair) - Senior Digital Research Specialist in Academic IT at University of Oxford’s IT Services
 * Elli Mylonas (elli.mylonas@brown.edu) : TEI Technical Council - Senior Digital Humanities Librarian at Brown University
 * 'Sebastian Rahtz (sebastian.rahtz@it.ox.ac.uk) : TEI Technical Council - Director of Academic IT at University of Oxford’s IT Services

Other TEI and DH experts

 * Syd Bauman : Senior XML programmer analyst at Northeastern University Digital Scholarship Group
 * Alexander Czmiel : researcher in Digital Humanities at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Follow up
Participants will have the option of applying for a grant of up to $1000 from the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium to allow them to finish their work and make it available to others. Details for this competition will be provided after the workshop has taken place.

This workshop is being sponsored by the TEI Consortium (http://www.tei-c.org/) which will provide lunch, coffee and snacks.