Training

The Taylor Editions texts are primarily the result of a practical training course in creating Digital Editions, which is led by library staff at the Taylor Institution Library. The University of Oxford is now making the online version of this training course freely available to all, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) license.

The In-Person Training Course

The in-person Digital Editions course runs annually over the eight weeks of Hilary Term and is open to all members of Oxford University. Participants benefit from learning a broad range of digital skills, from how to best take images for their own research, to TEI encoding, research data management, and even some basic paleography. Further details on the course, including a course programme, can be found on the Taylor Institution Library website.

The Digital Editions course is run by library staff at the Taylor Institution Library. Librarians are ideally placed to teach digitisation and Digital Humanities, as they combine subject knowledge, expert information management skills and a wide knowledge of other support services, such as (in Oxford) the Centre for Digital Scholarship. In this course, librarians offer introductory training on text selection, imaging, transcription, encoding (two sessions), quality assurance, preservation and delivery. The aim is to give participants an overview of the main elements of a digitisation project, raising awareness of the issues to be considered (and budgetted for) in funded digitisation projects, and where to seek advice.

The Online Training Course

The online training course covers exactly the same material. It was developed in 2020. While there have been some cosmetic changes to the resources discussed, the essential information is still current. The training is interactive - the XML sessions have exercises to complete, and many of the slides have clickable hyperlinks, sometimes embedded in images. Don't forget to explore the resources - each session has a worksheet to help you with that stage of the course. Please send any feedback to emma.huber@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Course Content

Session One. Introduction. Registration and choosing a text.
Task: Decide which text to work on and note the details (a link to a catalogue record or similar).

Session Two. Digitisation – images. How to take, use, describe and share images appropriately.
Task: Organise images of your text, either by taking them yourself, or finding online images.

Session Three. Transcription. Editorial decisions and special characters.
Task: Start transcribing your text, if you haven’t already. Depending on the length of your text, you may find you continue transcribing until the end of session 7.

Session Four. Encoding. Introduction to XML and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
Task: Start encoding the transcription you have so far. From now on you may prefer to continue your transcription within the xml editor and do encoding and transcription in parallel.

Session Five. Encoding 2. Navigating the TEI documentation. More advanced editorial encoding.
Task: You may wish to add an extra layer of more complex encoding to your text, depending on your research interests. Continue transcribing and encoding.

Session Six. Quality Assurance. Tips and tricks for checking your work.
Task: Try out xml transformations to make a proof reading copy of your text. Proof read your earlier work. Continue transcribing, encoding and proof reading.

Session Seven. Preservation. Using a repository.
Task: Complete your transcription and encoding. Once happy, deposit all the files in a repository and explore options for publication.

Session Eight. Publication and Dissemination.
Task: reflect on your edition. Is there anything you would have done differently?

Contact Us

While the training materials are available to all, this is a practical course, and we can only offer to support work done by members of the University of Oxford. To take full advantage of the course, participants will need an XML template (meaning a basic TEI file, such as can be generated by xml editors such as oXygen) to get them started on their project, and will also need a platform such as Taylor Editions on which to publish their editions.

Members of the University of Oxford should email emma.huber@bodleian.ox.ac.uk to obtain the XML template, and to access one-to-one help. For members of the university, the TEI Header, with all the metadata about your text, will be provided for you, so please wait until you have chosen your text before requesting a template.

Feedback

We really hope you enjoy this course. Any feedback would be very gratefully received. Please email emma.huber@bodleian.ox.ac.uk with your comments.