Using my recently completed dissertation as a starting point, I’d like to explore how the approach I’ve adopted might be improved upon, extended, or simply serve as a discussion point for other projects.

For my dissertation, I digitized and marked up a 1794 English blank-verse translation of Virgil’s Aeneid using a customized TEI schema to identify common poetic figures and tropes used by the translator. Once complete, the XML document was rendered separately within two different content management systems (also customized) to display the various encoded features for assistance in poetic analysis.

How viable is the sharing of my schema with other texts or projects for poetic figure analysis? I know how I would apply it to more texts, but knowing how others might use it could vastly change the customization (most likely for the better!). If the schema itself lacks applicability to others’ projects, at least the project’s single-source model and the process I followed could prove of use to others, specifically: 1) digitization of a physical artifact; 2) production of a custom TEI schema; 3) production of a TEI-encoded document; 4) insertion of said TEI-document into content management systems such as XTF and TEI Boilerplate; and 5) customization of content management systems to display desired textual features.

A number of textually-oriented DH projects are using TEI (the Text Encoding Initiative) as a data format, and so far the easiest way to get TEI out to the reader is via TEI Boilerplate.  Boilerplate was designed with customization in mind, and there are some good examples online, like the Petrarchive, which goes beyond custom colors and fonts by using the CSS switcher and <choice> blocks to allow the reader to switch between a transcription and edited text.  Beyond customization, there is room for improvement: the default installation of Boilerplate is slow to load, throws some Javascript errors (relating to JQuery BlockUI, which might be part of the speed problem), and uses an outdated version of JQuery (1.10.2, while the latest is 2.1.3).  I’d like to propose a hacking session in which we sit down with our copies of Boilerplate and our favorite text editors or IDE’s to address any or all of the following:

1. gain some collective, hands-on experience in customizing Boilerplate,
2. try to speed up Boilerplate (perhaps by fixing those BlockUI errors?), and
3. modernize our Boilerplate installations by upgrading JQuery to the latest version, fixing anything that breaks along the way.

This session would be more praxis than theory, but we should be able to generalize from our experiences; bring a laptop, not a tablet, and bring a copy of a TEI project you’d like to share and work on customizing together with the group.