Upcoming Events at the WWP

No events are currently scheduled. Please check back later or contact us at wwp@neu.edu for details of future events.

Past Events

May 15, 2023

Antiracist Markup Practices Symposium

Remote, hosted by Northeastern University

This event will be an opportunity for participants to hear from digital projects that are working to develop antiracist editing and encoding practices, and to think through some of the potential and challenges for representing marginalized and racialized identities through markup.

This event will be a fully virtual half-day symposium taking place between 12:00–4:00pm (Eastern). The symposium will investigate the implications of social justice frameworks for text encoding theory and practice. The focus of this event will be on text encoding with TEI and XML, but we want to ensure the discussions are generative for anyone with an interest in antiracist digital cultural heritage work. To that end, we are holding an optional orientation session at 12–12:45pm. Following a break, we will have presentations and discussion from 1–4pm.

We are honored to announce that Clayton McCarl, Mary Chapman, Sydney Lines, Joey Takeda, Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, Xóchitl M. Flores-Marcial, and Caitlin Pollock will be speaking about their diverse collection of projects.

We are grateful to the Northeastern University Humanities Center for supporting this event.

Schedule:

• Prequel Session (optional), 12:00–12:45: Orientation in XML and TEI
• Welcome and Framing, 1:00–1:30
• Project Presentations and Discussion, 1:30–2:10: Featuring Caitlin Pollock, Mary Chapman, Sydney Lines, and Joey Takeda
• Break, 2:10–2:20
• Project Presentations and Discussion, 2:20–3:00: Featuring Clayton McCarl, Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, and Xóchitl M. Flores-Marcial
• Group Discussion, 3:00–4:00

The symposium will feature perspectives from a range of researchers and projects:

• Clayton McCarl, University of North Florida, will consider digital editing as a pedagogical framework in which students can engage with and take leadership on matters related to diversity and inclusion at the undergraduate level. Clayton McCarl, associate professor of Spanish and digital humanities at the University of North Florida, will consider ways that a faculty leader can facilitate access to relevant archival materials; guide students in approaching processes of markup, contextualization and creation of metadata; and provide an online platform in which digital versions can be published. His reflections relate to his work with students in the context of four projects: Editing the Eartha M.M. White Collection, the Viola Muse Digital Edition, the North Florida Editorial Workshop, and coloniaLab.
• Mary Chapman, University of British Columbia, Sydney Lines, University of British Columbia, and Joey Takeda, Simon Fraser University, will describe the challenges they have encountered and the solutions they have considered for dealing with racialized language in the Winnifred Eaton Archive. Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954) was a popular early biracial Chinese North American author, journalist, screenwriter and playwright whose best known works were published under the faux Japanese pen-name “Onoto Watanna,” a controversial persona that she assumed for over two decades. We will reflect on a number of key questions: What constitutes a slur? What kind of decisions would we have to make to encode slurs? What's at stake in evaluating whether an epithet is a slur or not and whether it needs redaction? What does it mean to ask encoders to read texts in search of slurs? What kinds of engagements do we risk encouraging in these texts if we frame them in a way that emphasizes their worst parts? How do we responsibly attend to an archive of a racialized person who sometimes further marginalized other races?
• Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, Haverford College, and Xóchitl M. Flores-Marcial, California State University, Northridge will present on the Ticha project. The Ticha website (Lillehaugen et al. 2019, Broadwell et al. 2020) makes a corpus of Colonial Valley Zapotec texts available to a global audience, while centering the Zapotec audience. In Lillehaugen’s advanced undergraduate linguistics classes, Ticha serves as a resource as well as a space for the co-creation of knowledge. We describe here both the course-long project wherein students transcribe and analyze a colonial era Zapotec-language text, encoding it in TEI to create a digital edition and the community impact and use of these resources. The student work includes community collaboration and the clear framing of the central audience of the resources. We reflect on the opportunities and challenges in leveraging university resources, including this curricular space, for the creation of public facing scholarship, specifically digital editions of colonial Zapotec texts.
• Caitlin Pollock, University of Michigan, will be speaking about the Black DH Schema, an anti-racist and anti-colonial effort to reimagine the uses and users of the TEI guidelines and move toward encoding that presumes Blackness and Black people as central to engaging text--whether in discovery, access, analysis, collection, and/or preservation. In this talk, we will share a framework that addresses challenges and tensions Black DH researchers--including librarians, graduate students, and independent scholars--encounter in the TEI standards. This framework of critical care and codework grapples with the complexities of transforming historically de-centered voices into data, the politics of labeling the Black body using tags, and the role of encoders in interpreting and annotating Black voices. It also enkindles the design and development of a Black DH Schema for TEI. This project started in 2019 and was put on pause during the COVID-19 global pandemic to prioritize the mental and physical well-being of the project members. In 2023, the two project leads decided to return to the project to develop next steps and deliverables. This talk will share the early progress of the project, as well as a timeline of our next steps and future plans for phase one of the project. We will further emphasize and discuss the values and principles guiding this project in both process and product, including limning and cultivating collaboration, workflows and timelines, the importance of feminist timekeeping, and critical kindness--from design to comprehensive documentation.

May 16–20, 2022

Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist: Intensive, Teaching-focused

Remote, hosted by Northeastern University

Interested in word vectors, but not sure about learning a programming language? Never heard of word vectors, but now you’re curious? This new institute series introduces humanists to word embedding models: a family of text analysis techniques that asks, in Ben Schmidt’s words, “what if we could model all relationship between words as spatial ones? what words are like other words?” Word vectors offer an opportunity to explore the semantic spaces and relationships within a large corpus, discover analogies between words, and investigate subtleties of register and genre.

Supported by a generous grant from the NEH, we offer four events: two focused on research and two focused on teaching applications, with two levels—introductory and intensive—for each audience. The introductory events will use simple, open-access web tools hosted in the Women Writers Online Lab, while the intensive events will focus on using RStudio and command-line tools. All four institutes will consider how to make and assess arguments about and with text analysis data, and discuss how to evaluate the validity of methods, data preparation, and tool configuration. Participants will work with their own corpora, which will be hosted in the WWP Lab. After each event, participants will receive support and guidance in implementing these techniques in their home research and teaching environments.

This session will be an intensive institute focused on teaching uses of word vectors, using RStudio and command-line tools. The schedule for this workshop is available here. This will be a virtual event.

For more information, see here. Please contact us at wwp@neu.edu to express interest in this series.

July 12–16, 2021

Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist: Intensive, Research-focused

Remote, hosted by Northeastern University

Interested in word vectors, but not sure about learning a programming language? Never heard of word vectors, but now you’re curious? This new institute series introduces humanists to word embedding models: a family of text analysis techniques that asks, in Ben Schmidt’s words, “what if we could model all relationship between words as spatial ones? what words are like other words?” Word vectors offer an opportunity to explore the semantic spaces and relationships within a large corpus, discover analogies between words, and investigate subtleties of register and genre.

Supported by a generous grant from the NEH, we offer four events: two focused on research and two focused on teaching applications, with two levels—introductory and intensive—for each audience. The introductory events will use simple, open-access web tools hosted in the Women Writers Online Lab, while the intensive events will focus on using RStudio and command-line tools. All four institutes will consider how to make and assess arguments about and with text analysis data, and discuss how to evaluate the validity of methods, data preparation, and tool configuration. Participants will work with their own corpora, which will be hosted in the WWP Lab. After each event, participants will receive support and guidance in implementing these techniques in their home research and teaching environments.

This session will be an intensive institute focused on research uses of word vectors, using RStudio and command-line tools. The schedule for this workshop is available here.

For more information, see here. Please contact us at wwp@neu.edu to express interest in this series.

May 24–28, 2021

Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist: Introductory, Teaching-focused

Remote, hosted by Northeastern University

Interested in word vectors, but not sure about learning a programming language? Never heard of word vectors, but now you’re curious? This new institute series introduces humanists to word embedding models: a family of text analysis techniques that asks, in Ben Schmidt’s words, “what if we could model all relationship between words as spatial ones? what words are like other words?” Word vectors offer an opportunity to explore the semantic spaces and relationships within a large corpus, discover analogies between words, and investigate subtleties of register and genre.

Supported by a generous grant from the NEH, we offer four events: two focused on research and two focused on teaching applications, with two levels—introductory and intensive—for each audience. The introductory events will use simple, open-access web tools hosted in the Women Writers Online Lab, while the intensive events will focus on using RStudio and command-line tools. All four institutes will consider how to make and assess arguments about and with text analysis data, and discuss how to evaluate the validity of methods, data preparation, and tool configuration. Participants will work with their own corpora, which will be hosted in the WWP Lab. After each event, participants will receive support and guidance in implementing these techniques in their home research and teaching environments.

This session will be an introductory institute focused on teaching uses of word vectors, using the WWP’s web-based Women Writers Vector Toolkit. The schedule for this workshop is available here.

For more information, see here. Please contact us at wwp@neu.edu to express interest in this series.

July 17–19, 2019

Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist: Introductory, Research-focused

Northeastern University

Interested in word vectors, but not sure about learning a programming language? Never heard of word vectors, but now you’re curious? This new institute series introduces humanists to word embedding models: a family of text analysis techniques that asks, in Ben Schmidt’s words, “what if we could model all relationship between words as spatial ones? what words are like other words?” Word vectors offer an opportunity to explore the semantic spaces and relationships within a large corpus, discover analogies between words, and investigate subtleties of register and genre.

Supported by a generous grant from the NEH, we offer four events: two focused on research and two focused on teaching applications, with two levels—introductory and intensive—for each audience. The introductory events will use simple, open-access web tools hosted in the Women Writers Online Lab, while the intensive events will focus on using RStudio and command-line tools. All four institutes will consider how to make and assess arguments about and with text analysis data, and discuss how to evaluate the validity of methods, data preparation, and tool configuration. Participants will work with their own corpora, which will be hosted in the WWP Lab. After each event, participants will receive support and guidance in implementing these techniques in their home research and teaching environments.

The July 2019 session will be an introductory institute focused on research uses of word vectors, using the WWP’s web-based Women Writers Vector Toolkit. The schedule for this workshop is available here.

April 4–6, 2018

Introduction to TEI Encoding and Schema Design

Northeastern University

Dissatisfied with Google Books? Curious about digital formats that can communicate scholarly ideas? This seminar offers an intensive exploration of scholarly text encoding, aimed at an audience of humanities scholars, archivists, and digital humanists. We focus on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, a magnificent but complex language for representing digital scholarship and the gold standard for rigor in digital texts. Through a combination of hands-on practice, presentation, and discussion, participants will work through the essentials of TEI markup and consider how markup languages make meaning and support scholarship in the digital age.

This seminar will also introduce participants to the essential concepts and techniques of customization, as well as to some of the larger design issues that can affect work flow, interoperability, and data curation. Participants will learn how to design custom schemas that will work for their particular documents, research goals, and project constraints. Topics covered include:

• Text markup languages as an instrument of humanities scholarship
• Basics of TEI markup: essential text structures and genres
• Advanced TEI markup: editorial markup and commentary, details of physical documents, complex structures
• Contextual information and metadata
• Essentials of the TEI ODD customization language
• Designing a schema for your project: data constraint, work flow, and long-term maintenance

No prior experience is necessary.

The schedule for this workshop is available here.

June 12–16, 2017

Introduction to XSLT @ DHSI

University of Victoria

XSLT is the power tool of the XML world. It is a computer programming language intended to transform one XML document (e.g., in TEI) to another XML document (e.g., in XHTML); furthermore, it is expressed in XML itself. For digital humanists familiar with XML languages like TEI, EAD, METS, MODS, or DocBook, and XHTML, SVG, KML, or MathML, XSLT makes it possible to transform, manipulate, and publish your data in extraordinarily flexible ways. This hands-on course will introduce participants to the essential concepts of XSLT 2.0 in a digital humanities context, dealing with real-world textual data (either from the participant’s own project or provided by the instructors). Participants will explore the basic capacities of XSLT 2.0 for TEI-to-TEI and TEI-to-XHTML transformations, writing basic transforms of their own.

Prerequisites: Fluency in XML and TEI is assumed. Familiarity with XHTML very helpful. Familiarity with CSS or JavaScript helpful. See the DHSI site for more information.

April 7–8, 2017

Introduction to TEI Customization

Northeastern University

Since the release in 2007 of the most recent version of TEI (P5), TEI users have had a very different relationship to the TEI Guidelines. Unlike previous versions, TEI P5 does not exist in a “default” or “vanilla” state: any TEI schema used in a text encoding project must be generated from the TEI source and involves some degree of choice and selection. When properly planned, the TEI customization process can make a huge difference to the efficiency of a TEI project and the quality and longevity of its data. Good customizations capture the project’s specific modeling decisions, and ensure consistency in the data, while retaining as much interoperability and mutual intelligibility with other TEI projects and tools as possible. Customization also contributes importantly to the process of data curation, both at the time of data creation and later in the project’s life cycle. This seminar will introduce participants to the central concepts of TEI customization and to the language (a variant of the TEI itself) in which TEI customizations are written. Topics covered include:

• Background on how the TEI schema is organized
• Essentials of the TEI’s customization language
• Using Roma to generate schemas and documentation
• Conformance and interoperability

The schedule for this workshop is available here.

February 17–18, 2017

Introduction to TEI

Northeastern University

Dissatisfied with Google Books? Curious about digital formats that can communicate scholarly ideas? This seminar offers an intensive exploration of scholarly text encoding, aimed at an audience of humanities scholars, archivists, and digital humanists. We focus on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, a magnificent but complex language for representing digital scholarship and the gold standard for rigor in digital texts. Through a combination of hands-on practice, presentation, and discussion, participants will work through the essentials of TEI markup and consider how markup languages make meaning and support scholarship in the digital age. Topics covered include:

• Text markup languages as an instrument of humanities scholarship
• Basics of TEI markup: essential text structures and genres
• Advanced TEI markup: editorial markup and commentary, details of physical documents, complex structures
• Contextual information and metadata

No prior experience is necessary.

The schedule for this workshop is available here.

January 12 and 19, 1–4pm; January 13, 10am–1pm, 2017

Introduction to XSLT

Northeastern University

XSLT is a crucial tool for those working with the TEI, both as a key part of any XML publication system and also as a technology for manipulating and managing XML data. As a programming language that can be used to transform XML data into other formats, it is immensely powerful and also comparatively approachable for those already familiar with XML. This seminar will provide participants with an understanding of the essential concepts of XSLT, focusing on examples and use cases from TEI data in the humanities.

Familiarity with TEI and XML is assumed but no prior experience with XSLT is necessary.

The schedule for this workshop is available here.

March 30, 2016

Early Modern Digital Pedagogies

Northeastern University

The Women Writers Project and the Folger Shakespeare Library are offering a half-day workshop on digital humanities pedagogy. This workshop will focus on Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO), a new project that will provide online, encoded transcriptions of manuscripts from the Folger collection, and on Women Writers Online, a long-standing and well-loved collection of women's texts from 1526–1850. In the opening sessions we'll explore the intellectual and editorial foundations of the WWO and EMMO collections and the ways in which detailed digital markup supports textual exploration. In the second half, we'll discuss successful classroom assignments and brainstorm new pedagogical approaches to engage students with early texts and digital methods.

The schedule for this workshop is available here.

March 17-18, 2016

Introduction to XSLT

Northeastern University

XSLT is a crucial tool for those working with the TEI, both as a key part of any XML publication system and also as a technology for manipulating and managing XML data. As a programming language that can be used to transform XML data into other formats, it is immensely powerful and also comparatively approachable for those already familiar with XML. This seminar will provide participants with an understanding of the essential concepts of XSLT, focusing on examples and use cases from TEI data in the humanities.

Familiarity with TEI and XML is assumed but no prior experience with XSLT is necessary.

The schedule for this workshop is available here.

November 9-10, 2015

Introduction to TEI

Northeastern University

Dissatisfied with Google Books? Curious about digital formats that can communicate scholarly ideas? This seminar offers an intensive exploration of scholarly text encoding, aimed at an audience of humanities scholars, archivists, and digital humanists. We focus on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, a magnificent but complex language for representing digital scholarship and the gold standard for rigor in digital texts. Through a combination of hands-on practice, presentation, and discussion, participants will work through the essentials of TEI markup and consider how markup languages make meaning and support scholarship in the digital age. Topics covered include:

• Text markup languages as an instrument of humanities scholarship
• Basics of TEI markup: essential text structures and genres
• Advanced TEI markup: editorial markup and commentary, details of physical documents, complex structures
• Contextual information and metadata

No prior experience is necessary.

The schedule for this workshop is available here.

June 15-19, 2015

Advanced TEI Concepts

University of Victoria

This advanced TEI workshop provides both instruction and consultation to participants in several complementary directions.

It offers an intensive, advanced exploration of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines as a system for modeling humanities information. We will focus in turn on topics including the TEI class system, stronger ways to formalize your TEI data, the role and representation of interpretation in markup, and uses of stand-off annotation. Hands-on work will focus on the participants’ own projects, approached through the lens of the workshop topics. This part of the course is aimed at those who are interested in the TEI from a theoretical as well as a practical perspective, including those who want to gain a better understanding of markup for teaching purposes. Participants will come away with a deeper and more expert understanding of the Guidelines and their use as a powerful representational tool.

Further, this workshop will introduce participants to the central concepts of TEI customization and to the ODD language (a variant of the TEI itself) in which TEI customizations are written. Any TEI schema used in a text encoding project must be generated from the TEI source and involves some degree of choice and selection. The TEI provides a specific system for making and documenting these choices and selections, called customization. When properly planned, the TEI customization process can make a huge difference to the efficiency of a TEI project and the quality and longevity of its data. Good customizations capture the project’s specific modeling decisions, and ensure consistency in the data, while retaining as much interoperability and mutual intelligibility with other TEI projects and tools as possible. Customization also contributes importantly to the process of data curation, both at the time of data creation and later in the project’s life cycle. Topics covered include: Background on how the TEI schema is organized; Essentials of the TEI's customization language; Generating schemas and documentation from the customization; Designing a schema for your project: data constraint, work flow, and long-term maintenance; Conformance and interoperability.

This course assumes a firm prior grounding in XML and the TEI Guidelines, either from an introductory workshop or from intensive self-guided study, prior practice, and significant experience. Having a project requiring such engagement will be an asset, in that you will be able to consider the skills and techniques of the course in the context of your ongoing work.

Tuition scholarship and travel bursaries are available.

Registration is now closed for this event.

March 11-13, 2014

Taking TEI Further: Transforming and Publishing TEI Data

Northeastern University

XSLT is a crucial tool for those working with the TEI, both as a key part of any XML publication system and also as a technology for manipulating and managing XML data. As a programming language that can be used to transform XML data into other formats, it is immensely powerful and also comparatively approachable for those already familiar with XML. For individual scholars and librarians (who may not have access to technical support or programmer time), XSLT can be a remarkably enabling skill, making it possible for them to create usable output in a variety of formats, including HTML, formats used by visualization software, and even PDF. The challenge for digital humanists is not in finding XSLT resources; because it is such an important technology, there are numerous tutorials online and workshops available. However, these materials and events are almost universally aimed at an industry audience, rather than at humanities scholars. What we seek to do in these seminars is provide an introduction to XSLT that is aimed at a scholarly audience, using examples from real humanities data and approaching the topic from the perspective of those who may be familiar with the TEI and XML, but not with other programming languages. This seminar will provide participants with an understanding of the essential concepts of XSLT, focusing on examples and use cases from TEI data in the humanities. We will also help participants learn how to use simple templates to create more complex XSLT stylesheets, and how to reuse and reverse engineer stylesheets from other projects.

Registration is now closed for this event.

May 14-16, 2014

Taking TEI Further: TEI Customization

Northeastern University

Since the release in 2007 of the most recent version of TEI (P5), TEI users have had a very different relationship to the TEI Guidelines. Unlike previous versions, TEI P5 does not exist in a “default” or “vanilla” state: any TEI schema used in a text encoding project must be generated from the TEI source and involves some degree of choice and selection. When properly planned, the TEI customization process can make a huge difference to the efficiency of a TEI project and the quality and longevity of its data. Good customizations capture the project’s specific modeling decisions, and ensure consistency in the data, while retaining as much interoperability and mutual intelligibility with other TEI projects and tools as possible. Customization also contributes importantly to the process of data curation, both at the time of data creation and later in the project’s life cycle. This seminar will introduce participants to the central concepts of TEI customization and to the language (a variant of the TEI itself) in which TEI customizations are written. Topics covered include:

• Background on how the TEI schema is organized
• Essentials of the TEI’s customization language
• Using Roma to generate schemas and documentation
• Designing a schema for your project: data constraint, work flow, and long- term maintenanc
• Conformance and interoperability

No registration fee; travel funding is available.
Apply (deadline: February 25, 2014)

June 2-6, 2014

Advanced TEI Concepts

University of Victoria

This workshop offers an intensive, advanced exploration of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines as a system for modeling humanities information. We will focus in turn on topics including the TEI class system, stronger ways to formalize your TEI data, the role and representation of interpretation in markup, and uses of stand-off annotation. Hands-on work will focus on the participants’ own projects, approached through the lens of the workshop topics. This course is aimed at those who are interested in the TEI from a theoretical as well as a practical perspective, including those who want to gain a better understanding of markup for teaching purposes. Participants will come away with a deeper and more expert understanding of the Guidelines and their use as a powerful representational tool.

This course assumes a firm prior grounding in XML and the TEI Guidelines, either from an introductory workshop or from intensive self-guided study and prior practice.

Tuition scholarship and travel bursaries are available.

June 2-6, 2014

Text Encoding Fundamentals and their Application

University of Victoria

For those new to the field, this is an introduction to the theory and practice of encoding electronic texts for the humanities. This workshop is designed for individuals who are contemplating embarking on a text-encoding project, or for those who would like to better understand the philosophy, theory, and practicalities of encoding in XML (Extensible Markup Language) using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. No prior experience with XML is assumed, but the course will move quickly through the basics.

Both sections provide a strong introduction to text encoding and cover the essentials of TEI, but with slightly different emphasis. Section A (Constance Crompton and Laura Estill) will focus on manuscripts and primary source materials, taking participants through the process of representing original documents in TEI. Section B (Syd Bauman and Emily Murphy) will focus on contextual information with an emphasis on representing biographical, historical, and geographic information within the text.

Tuition scholarship and travel bursaries are available.

August 20-22, 2014

Taking TEI Further: Teaching With TEI

Northeastern University

As digital humanities increasingly gains profile in traditional humanities departments, the subject is becoming of greater interest in graduate and even undergraduate teaching. For faculty with TEI projects of their own, or with a strong research interest in the TEI, the challenge is to design a digital humanities syllabus that is rigorously and usefully digital, and yet still focused on humanities content. To what extent can text encoding be a useful pedagogical instrument, and what kinds of concepts does it help to teach? What kinds of practical infrastructure and prior preparation are needed to support a course of this type? What broader critical ideas in digital humanities and in traditional humanities domains would form a strong context? In this seminar, participants will each work on a course of their own, with opportunities for the group to workshop each syllabus and discuss the course narrative and design.

No registration fee; travel funding is available
Apply (deadline: April 25, 2014)