[See uploaded PDF for full details and Spanish Translation]

This half-day in-person workshop introduces textual scholars and practitioners to the LEAF Commons suite of tools, a set of web-based, easy-to-use tools that support text encoding, named entity recognition, web annotation, text analysis and publication without users having to learn complex encoding languages, and supports the easy movement from one interoperable tool to the other depending on users’ needs. These freely available tools support digital scholarly workflows for the collaborative production and publication of scholarly and documentary texts, editions, and collections on the web, without the need for software installation, while promoting best practices for text encoding, annotation, and metadata standards. The LEAF Commons suite enables the use of individual tools for specific purposes, as well as supporting an end-to-end workflow beginning with outputs of optical character or handwritten text recognition systems, transcriptions, or born-digital texts and ends with publication on the web, allowing it to serve a wide range of research and pedagogical uses.

LEAF stands for the Linked Editing Academic Framework, a collaborative software suite that provides both a comprehensive virtual research environment but also a set of ‘Commons’ modular tools for text editing and publication. The LEAF Commons tools constitute an accessible, low-barrier, no-cost infrastructure for the production of online texts, editions, or collections, whether for teaching or for undertaking research and collaboration on a sustainable basis. The Commons makes LEAF tools freely available in the browser, enabling collaboration and publication through Github, in addition to local storage. Promoting the reuse of data in keeping with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles, LEAF uses open-source software, open-access platforms, and open international standards for best practices in text-encoding (TEI-XML) and web annotation (RDF). LEAF Commons offers communities of researchers, teachers, and students the opportunity to take part in digital knowledge production and open collaboration. The workshop will end with an open discussion about pursuing such forms of open knowledge production and collaboration.

The LEAF Commons tools introduced will include:

LEAF-Writer: an open-source, open-access Extensible Markup Language (XML) editor that runs in a web browser and offers scholars and their students a rich textual editing experience without the need to download, install, and configure proprietary software, pay ongoing subscription fees, or learn complex coding languages. This user-friendly editing environment incorporates Text Encoding Initiatives (TEI) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) standards, meaning that texts edited in LEAF-Writer are interoperable with other texts produced by the scholarly editing community and with other materials produced for the Semantic Web. It also incorporates Named Entity Recognition and reconciliation with, or linking to, linked open data identifiers through the incorporation of the NERVE tool. LEAF-Writer is particularly valuable for pedagogical purposes, allowing instructors to teach students best practices for encoding texts without also having to teach students how to code. LEAF-Writer is designed to help bridge the gap by providing access to all who want to engage in new and important forms of textual production, analysis, and discovery.

DToC: (the Dynamic Table of Contexts) provides an online interactive reading and publication environment for digital scholarly texts where the two conventional overviews provided in print editions - the table of contents and the index - have been dynamically merged to provide an interactive online e-reading experience that leverages the power of XML markup. Users can build a DToC edition from one or more TEI-XML files, then curate and label the underlying elements and attributes in order to understand where named entities, topics, and concepts can be traced within the edition. Editions can be stored using URLs and shared with readers as published or teaching texts.

LEAF-TE: (The LEAF Turning Engine) is a web interface that enables users to easily and automatically transform documents between formats. It converts HTR/OCR output (from various sources including Trankribus) to TEI-XML for importing into LEAF-Writer or other editors.) It converts TEI-XML to HTML, Markdown, and plain text for exporting to web publishing and text analysis environments, including the Dynamic Table of Contexts.

NERVE: (the Named Entity Relationship and Vetting Environment) is an application that performs Named Entity Recognition (NER) on machine-readable texts, allowing users to identify candidate entities in a document, review, and correct the results . NERVE suggests relevant Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) for entities, so users can reconcile data to an authority such as Wikidata or the Virtual International Authority File to provide the basis for Linked Open Data (LOD) Web Annotations. Users can export their reconciled data in TEI-XML or HTML formats to an online repository or to their desktop. NERVE will be able to be used from within LEAF-Writer, or as a stand-alone tool and will be demonstrated during the workshop.