Scope of the workshop

This half-day workshop will introduce strategies for handling TEI when publishing with static site generators and front-end technologies. The workshop will focus on isomorphic approaches to publishing TEI on the web or, in other words, publishing TEI with little or no transformation, or with a structure-preserving mapping that allows working with the output as if it were the initial data source.

In particular, attendees will be introduced to CETEIcean as a way of publishing TEI with minimal (or no) transformation (Cayless and Viglianti 2018). The main focus of the workshop will be learning how this approach can be used in conjunction with static site generators and will work on examples in “vanilla” JavaScript, React, and Gatsby. This workshop is aimed at attendees who already have some experience with programming (including XSLT) and the command line; however, all are welcome and will be supported as much as possible throughout the workshop.

A version of this workshop was previously given at the Text Encoding Initiative conference in 2022 and 2023. The 2023 workshop had an attendance of about 25 individuals, including grad students, faculty at various stages of their career, and research software developers. This version of the workshop will be lightly but significantly updated with a new template and new examples. Instruction will be in English with bilingual slides English and Spanish.

Motivation

Digital humanities projects that result in the creation of digital output—typically a website—digital editions are prone to what Smithies et al. call the “digital entropy of software and digital infrastructure” (2019). Static sites have become a common choice for archiving legacy projects that risk going offline (Smithies et al. 2019, Summers 2016) because they only require the absolute minimum from hosting infrastructure: a server to distribute documents at a given address. The sites themselves, once created, require no active maintenance and can be easily moved and transferred like any other collection of files. The Endings project at the University of Victoria, British Columbia (https://endings.uvic.ca/), for example, recommends static sites as a viable strategy for ensuring the longevity of Digital Humanities project publications. The Endings Principles for Digital Longevity include, among other strategies, the reduction of both software complexity and dependency on infrastructure. On the other hand, static sites cannot support features that would require an active server, such as large scale text search and user management; these features, therefore, are removed when projects are archived into static sites. Deriving static sites from an end-of-life project is the clear choice when access to infrastructure becomes limited. But this workshop addresses the question: What does it take to adopt static sites from the start?

*Schedule and requirements*

After an introduction on static sites and the motivations for using them, the workshop will cover the following topics:

• Exploring isomorphic approaches: CETEIcean and Verovio in “vanilla” JavaScript.
• Extend CETEIcean with Web Components.
• Extend CETEIcean with React.
• Using the static site generator Gatsby and the TEI plugins developed for the Scholarly Editing journal (gatsby-transformer-ceteicean and gatsby-theme-ceteicean).

In order to account for multiple levels of expertise, we may break into multiple groups for attendee-led collaborative work.

• Optional collaborative work: experiment with other frameworks that attendees may be familiar with (e.g. Vue, Angular, etc).
• Optional collaborative work: keeping within a single stack: applying optional transformations to XML documents in NodeJS (using JavaScript / TypeScript or XSLT via SaxonJS).

Example TEI documents and a Gatsby site template will be provided. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own TEI to work with.

Participants must bring their own laptop and be able to install (free) software on it. Internet access will be required. The tutor will require a projector.

References

Cayless, Hugh, and Raffaele Viglianti. “CETEIcean: TEI in the Browser.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2018, Washington, DC, July 31 - August 3, 2018. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2018. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 21 (2018). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol21.Cayless01.

Smithies, James, Carina Westling, Anna-Maria Sichani, Pam Mellen, and Arianna Ciula. 2019. “Managing 100 Digital Humanities Projects: Digital Scholarship & Archiving in King’s Digital Lab.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 013 (1).

Summers, Edward. 2016. “The Web’s Past Is Not Evenly Distributed.” Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (blog). May 27, 2016. https://mith.umd.edu/webs-past-not-evenly-distributed.

Biography

Dr. Raffaele (Raff) Viglianti is a Senior Research Software Developer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland. His research is grounded in digital humanities and textual scholarship, where “text” includes musical notation. He researches new and efficient practices to model and publish textual sources as innovative and sustainable digital scholarly resources. Dr. Viglianti is currently an elected member of the Text Encoding Initiative technical council and the Technical Editor of the Scholarly Editing journal.