DH2014Hackathon-Projects

DH2014 Hackathon Project Discussion Page

Participants

• Robert C Kahlert, Department of Protestant Theology, University of Vienna
• Raffaele Viglianti, University of Maryland
• Patrik Granholm, Uppsala University Library: Greek Manuscripts in Sweden. A Digitization and Cataloguing Project (http://www.manuscripta.se)
• Frederike Neuber,DiXiT - Ph.D. Fellow on „Digital Palaeography and scholarly editions“ at Graz University / Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities
• Felix Lange, Academy of Sciences and Literatur | Mainz, Project IBR (http://www.spatialhumanities.de)
• Emmanuelle Morlock, CNRS, HISoMA Laboratory (Histoire et Sources des mondes antiques / History and Origins of the Antique World)
• Elli Bleeker, PhD­student in Digital Humanities at Antwerp University; research fellow at DiXiT
• Magdalena Turska, University of Oxford
• Nick Laiacona, Performant Software Solutions LLC www.performantsoftware.com
• Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Professor of English and Co­Director of NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Northeastern University, Boston, MA USA
• Thomas Kollatz, Steinheim-Institute for German-Jewish History

• Sebastian Rahtz, University of Oxford
• James Cummings, University of Oxford
• Alex Czmiel,
• Hugh Cayless, Duke University
• Elli Mylonas, Brown University

Procedure

We will be using the wiki as a place for comments and discussion. The projects each participant proposed are all listed below. Ideally, the hackathon will be focussed around one or two projects that are useful to everyone. The participants are all experienced with TEI in various capacities, but they are not all skilled programmers. The hackathon would be a success if the outcome of the one day event was e a good start on one or two useful pieces of TEI related software. In order to achieve this, we should collectively decide on projects that are interesting, useful, generalizable, and do-able! We should also try to capitalize on everyone's skill set, and try to plan the event in such a way that we can all contribute to something.

You are all welcome to introduce yourselves, by adding a description of a few sentences to the list of participants above. And please, edit, correct and comment on the projects. We are also inviting the TEI Council and Board and other interested parties to look in on the discussions.

Proposed Projects

Mormon City Planning:

when early Mormonism ventured from Kirtland, Ohio, into Missouri, their prophet Joseph Smith Jr provided a revelation for the plat (city layout) of the new Zion (http://urbanplanning.library.cornell.edu/DOCS/smith.htm; http://zomarah.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/firstplatofzion.png), which was subsequently applied in the settlement of Far West, Missouri, for which two plats exist, one on sheepskin (https://www.lds.org/bc/content/shared/content/images/gospel-library/manual/32502/15-02 b.gif) in private possession and one on paper at BYU University (there is no online copy of this, but I have obtained a digital copy from BYU with their permission); however these plats were not only used to sketch out the city, but also to assign lots to settlers, and thus show secondary markup in pencil to allocate houses, redraw lot boundaries, etc; (http://zomarah.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/platoffarwestbig.png)

Comments:

• A clarification: What would the project strive to accomplish? Is this a visualization? georeferencing based on markup?

ODD Customization visualizer

A web-based tool to visualize any ODD customization against TEI-all. This could be useful when working on a customization (with Roma, or manually) to quickly and visually check that the ODD is still TEI-conformant and see how it diverges from the standard. I started working on a basic D3 visualization a couple of years ago, but haven't really touched the code since:https://github.com/raffazizzi/ODDViz I only restructured the repository a bit before sending this proposal.

Comments

ACE-based Web editor

MITH, at the University of Maryland has been working on an ACE-based web editor able to validate tei-all files in the browser and provide ODD-based contextual help (e.g. suggesting valid options when entering a new element). The grant that funded this work is now over, but there's plenty more to do. This is the GitHub repository: https://github.com/umd-mith/angles

Comments:

MS Description Display Framework

To create a simple web interface which would provide basic functionalities like browsing, searching and displaying TEI-files containing manuscript descriptions. The interface could be built using a Ubuntu server with nginx (http://nginx.org), and eXist-db (http://exist-db.org) following the setup guide and scripts provided by Grant Macken (https://github.com/grantmacken/nginx-eXist-ubuntu). I have already made some preliminary work on an eXist-db web interface and posted the code in our GitHub repository (https://github.com/manuscripta). This could be used as a starting point for further development. A possible goal for the hackathon could be to create an advanced search form in XQuery which would display snippets of the descriptions in the search results using the transform function with our XSL stylesheet, with links to the full description. All of the code, with detailed documentation, would be made public on GitHub for others to reuse and modify for their own projects. I think this would be beneficial to the TEI community at large, and especially to other cataloguing projects.

Comments:

Medieval Text Edition

Project isn't advanced enough to suggest concrete task, but the topic of interest is focussed around a digital scholarly edition of a medieval text (with corresponding images) encoded in XML/TEI. The edition will be enriched with palaeographical and codicological information (in both <text> and <teiHeader>) and the results can be visualized in a way which hopefully goes beyond the sometimes not very enlightening listing of data.

Comments:

Semantic Connections for Epigraphic Documents

I am currently working with epidoc documents in the context of the Project IBR. These documents, epigraphical editions from the catalogue "German Inscriptions Online" (inschriften.net), are (1) to be transformed into RDF­triples for semantic connection and for a fine­grained quantificational analysis in a Triple Store, (2) XSLT ­transformed into HTML­Documents for further annotation in the semantic annotator "Pundit"(thepund.it). I could surely contribute a programming task based on this points, but would also be happy to participate in another task, preferably based on "adding a TEI mode to a web editor".

Comments:

Zotero

Some TEI encoding project may need to use a "master bibliography" to group together all the bibliographic references that are used in a given text or collection of texts. Using the "masterfile" option in Oxygen give the user a convenient way of pointing to a reference without having to encode a ref each time it is used in a text or in a specific bibliographic section.

<bibl type="fromStone">
   <ptr target="#Breal1878"/>
   <citedRange>15</citedRange>
</bibl>

The bibliography can be inserted in a <back/> element with xinclude. But the question is how to use Zotero to create this file, update it and synchonize it with the biblographic masterfile. Though incomplete, the workflow I use works like that :

• the entering of the bibliographic entries is done with zotero, in a group library
• the zotero database is then exported in xml using the "bibliontology_rdf" format (the TEI export format being to restrictive in its formatting choices : e.g. does'nt include "short titles" which are a requisite in epigraphy
• the bibliontology rdf is converted in TEI through XSLT in Oxygen (modifying existing xslt :https://github.com/paregorios/Zotero-RDF-to-TEI-XML)
• If the user wants to add a new reference in the masterbibliography or correct an entry, he or she has to do go to zotero and follow the whole workflow of export - tranform process. But the user might not have the user right to do so. And of course, there are some potential conflicting issues.

How to improve that workflow ? use a version control system like git or subversion ? or adding/modifying an entry in xml / tei and then updating the zotero group library via api ?

Comments:

Migrating value lists form CSS frameworks to ODD

The author mode of the Oxygen editor can be customized with custom css functions. A part from the function providing a more user-friendly and tag free visualization of the tei content, one of the fuction allow the user to edit attributes or simple elements values using combo boxes or check boxes. The "form controls" can display values collected from an xml schema. But these values can also be just in the oxygen css. This may be used in a workflow to test some choices before integrating them in a more consistent and persistant way in the ODD (then exported in the schema).

This could be useful in case you have user that may be ok to change the values in the css code but would be relunctant to get involved with the ODD editing / schema generation process. cf. http://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/ug-editor/concepts/combo-box-editor.html#combo-box-editor

Comments:

--Raffaele.viglianti 19:20, 16 June 2014 (CEST) This is interesting, would like to work on it. I would suggest to make it less tied to Oxygen and think in terms of CSS to ODD, for example to limit attribute values (e.g. hi[rend=italic])

Visualization of intertextual TEI content

A digital archive containing a variety of material ­not necessarily limited to text­ related to a work, and subsequently encoded in such a way that the inter(textual)relations could be visualized.

Comments:

• Clarification: is the project about the visualization? the relationships? More detail would be great.

Rendering Complex Markup

Rendering complex markup in an innovative and playful way: reconstructing & visualizing author’s geographical position by the dates of sending of his letters (taking uncertainty into account)

Comments:

Magdalena Turska 12:36, 12 June 2014 (CEST)

Starting with a list of letters that have a place and date of sending the idea would be to present map overview of the author's journeys. See the simple Google Map at https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=z3q4AefiR7Us.kf1fVBHlu8qE

Fist ideas re visualisation:

• places color-coded with color getting darker to represent 'later' places
• similarly shaded lines along the routes between places
• animation with slider to show circle moving along the routes, size of the circle getting bigger with the uncertainty

Input data: each letter has assigned place name and 1+ time intervals (notBefore to not After)

Adding a TEI mode to a web editor

Title says it all!

Comments:

--Raffaele.viglianti 19:20, 16 June 2014 (CEST) How does the Angles proposal above sound?

Juxta Script support

Adding support for Bengali text to Juxta Commons

Comments:

• This is fairly narrow.

Visualization

The archive of early Caribbean texts and images is a fairly large project which will be heavily encoded (and a portion of texts will be encoded by July). I'd like to explore ways of using the TEI to visualize relations between and among texts and elements of texts.

Comments:

Discussion

What commonalities to you see? What seems interesting? Anything to add?

--Raffaele.viglianti 19:07, 16 June 2014 (CEST)

Core Builder

Another possible tool to work on: https://github.com/raffazizzi/coreBuilder It provides a simple web interface to create stand-off markup. TEI files can be open into multiple ACE editors and the user can click on elements with xml:ids to create references. The current version creates <app> elements containing <rdg>s with pointers to the selected elements. It should be easy enough to make the elements user configurable so that the Core Builder can be used to put together <linkGrp>s or <timeline>s. The tool is written in CoffeScript with a Backbone framework.