While digital humanities (DH) and digital scholarship (DS) are maturing as disciplines, the activities and products of DH and DS are still not consistently or readily understood or valued as research outputs. Part of this challenge is that there are limited structures in place to automatically make visible and discoverable “non-traditional” scholarly outputs like digital editions, digital exhibits, TEI-encoded texts, interactive maps, and visualizations. Further, despite shifts away from list-style curriculum vitae (CVs), there remains little clarity around how DH/DS activities and outputs should be reported in a researcher’s CV.

In this hands-on workshop, we will address both of these issues. We will begin by addressing scholarly technologies that enable the discovery, preservation, and publishing of DH/DS outputs, discussing ways that researchers can make their research legible and durable (e.g., persistent identifiers, metadata, repositories). We will then discuss strategies for reporting DH/DS and knowledge mobilization activities and outputs in list-style and narrative-style CVs, including tools and approaches to demonstrating the value and impact of this work within and beyond the academy.

Workshop audience:

Researchers at all stages (students, faculty, and staff) who are engaged in DH/DS practices

Learning outcomes

At the end of this workshop, you will be able to:

• Employ strategies for ensuring the long-term discoverability of digital scholarly editions and TEI-encoded texts

• Confidently seek recognition for your DH/DS activities and outputs

• Access tools & approaches for reporting your DH/DS and knowledge mobilization activities

• Effectively track and report your DH/DS outputs

Pre-requisites:

• Please bring a copy of your CV to this workshop, as well as examples of your DH/DS activities and outputs

About the speaker:

Ali Moore is a Digital Scholarship Librarian in the Research Commons at Simon Fraser University. Ali’s areas of expertise include open scholarship, responsible research assessment, and researcher online presence. She is a co-investigator on a scoping review exploring how knowledge mobilization is reported in CVs (and how tenure and promotion committees evaluate it), and a co-investigator in the health and well-being research cluster of The Arts Impact Partnership, a national coalition reimagining how we understand the impact of the arts. She serves as a member of the SFU Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing and is a co-convenor of the Association of Research Libraries Engaged Scholarship and Societal Impact Interest Group.

TEI markup provides structures that are particularly useful for processing data beyond what we can do with so-called “plain text”. A full-day workshop allows us plenty of time to teach the pull-processing of data from XML/TEI with simple, reusable XSLT templates to represent in simple TSV/CSV, HTML tables/charts, and (if time!) simple SVG graphics.

Knowing how to locate and explore data in your encoding can help to learn how to work with TEI and XML generally. This half-day workshop is designed for people who have some experience with TEI and seek to learn how to work with XML markup for analysis and research. Participants will gain a working, practical knowledge of the query language XPath and the transformation language XSLT, and learn how these can help to reduce reliance on software, packages and plugins that may become obsolete without warning. Further, XSLT's functional programming can serve as a way of articulating research questions around a document data model expressed in XML.

The emphasis of our workshop is ”pull-processing”, that is, extracting data and metadata from markup documents for analysis, as opposed to providing the reading view of a digital scholarly edition. Markup in documents supplies structures and contexts that are especially useful for processing data, beyond what we can do with so-called "plain text". We will demonstrate some basic XPath navigation and calculation functions, and then show how XPath is applied in XSLT templates to address specific nodes that hold data of interest for visualization.

We will process TEI documents composed in various languages represented by our workshop members' projects, to show that the code we write is transferable to multiple projects across language and cultural borders.

Participants will learn how to "pull" data from TEI and output text formats required for simple online tools, where the structure of the output data is transferable to many different online calculation programs and amenable to statistical processing. During the workshop we will produce some simple structured documents for storing, sharing, and visualizing data: HTML lists and tables as well as plain text tabulated data (CSV or TSV files), and (if we have time) simple SVG bar or line graphs.

We hope to process some participant-supplied XML before, during, and after the workshop. We will carefully document the XSLT that we supply during the workshop to assist participants with revising and adapting the code to their own projects.

The workshop material - including documentation, exercise examples and solutions - will be made available in a publicly and permanently accessible GitHub repository.

Outline

• Review and refresh understanding of XML tree structures

• Orientation to XPath

• Teach basic XSLT to produce simple outputs ready for analysis and visualization. This includes:

  • XML identity transformations to make changes to your markup systematically,

  • XML transformations to HTML that apply simple "push processing": to show how to work with XSLT templates that process and transform most of your nodes.

  • XML transformations for "pull processing": isolating and exploring data from your markup to make charts in HTML and visualizations in SVG.

• While learning XSLT, participants gain experience with simple HTML elements and structures for informational outputs. If time, we will provide orientation to SVG elements for simple graphics.

Room/Materials Required

• Instructors need: projector that can connect to laptop, network access helpful!

• Participants should bring laptop computers if possible.

• Instructors can provide complementary 90- or 120-day licenses for the oXygen XML Editor.

• Limit to 25 participants so instructors can connect with everyone.

Using case-studies of both successfully preserved and lost projects, this workshop outlines best practices and concrete approaches for achieving Endings-compliance. We will ask what it means to end a project, what should remain "on the shelf" in 20 years, and what happens when we run projects through existing archiving tools. We address the difference between archivable data and an archivable project, and the importance of preserving the latter as well as the former despite the challenges of digital dependencies. We cover practical steps to "staticize" various types of site, ask critical questions about interface, and discuss best practices for design. The course concludes with a documentation exercise that will help participants identify the strengths and weaknesses of an edition's documentation.

The workshop will be co-taught between members of the Endings Project team (Holmes, Jenstad, Takeda). Participants will leave with a detailed Endings-compliant project plan for a specific project version, with timelines, a list of requirements, potential outputs, and an archiving strategy to plan, develop, build, release, and archive your digital project in maximally sustainable ways.