“Here to enter a dyvel wyth thunder and fyre” – a plea for editorial infrastructure in the digital age.

Lansdowne Lecture at University of Victoria. January 31, 2022 at 10am Pacific time. Abstract: The editing of late-medieval plays involves making many individual decisions, but rather than making the editor’s job easier, digital technology often adds additional burdens, demanding the knowledge of encoding formats, fighting for server space, and planning for the long-term preservation of their cherished editions. Using the editing of late-medieval drama as a case study, Cummings argues that the existing infrastructure for digital textual editing fails to provide textual editors with the appropriate tools for the job of producing scholarly editions that are truly digital. A long-term proponent of standards such as the Text Encoding Initiative, he does not suggest that we do away with any of these concerns, but rather that we create standardised hosted interfaces for editorial tasks that leverage the power and expressivity of standards, while simultaneously assisting with long-term preservation. There are other potential benefits: such infrastructure could also enable data science research into editorial methods and the decisions editors make concerning any individual task, paving the way for more intelligent software in the future.

Academics retire and servers die: planning for failure in Digital Humanities projects

"Academics retire and servers die: planning for failure in Digital Humanities projects" a brief presentation for DHOxSS 2021 Panel on the long view (in this case looking back) of digital humanities projects. This uses the CURSUS project as a case study to argue that we should plan for failure of projects and produce archival-ready output by following guidelines such as those of the Endings Project.

Adventures in Hosting and Storage

"Adventures in Hosting and Storage" -- slides for a video talk given for Project “Endings” Symposium on 'Project Resiliency in the Digital Humanities', University of Victoria, 2021

Can We Make It Easier To Do the Right Thing? Infrastructure for digital scholarly editing

How do you create a scholarly digital edition following the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)? What benefits does this offer us? How onerous are any drawbacks to using this open international standard for digital text? When is it right to use the TEI and when is it better not to? Using his experience of TEI projects over the last two decades, Dr James Cummings investigates the use of the TEI for digital scholarly editing, concentrating specifically on the benefits and drawbacks of its use and highlighting the gaps in existing infrastructure that create barriers to creation, publication, analysis, and long-term preservation of scholarly digital editions. By identifying these gaps it is hoped that user-friendly software can be created to encourage editors to follow good practice in scholarly digital editing. This talk will include a short high-level overview of the TEI and is accessible to those with no experience in Digital Humanities or TEI.

Learning How To Fail Better: Resilience in Digital Humanities Projects

Learning How To Fail Better: Resilience in Digital Humanities Projects; A talk given on 17 January 2020 at the Centre for Data, Culture, and Society at University of Edinburgh.

Introducing Objectification: when is an <object> a <place>?

The TEI Guidelines recently (as of TEI P5 version 3.5.0, January 2019) added elements for describing objects and encoding the names of objects. These elements include: , , , as well as changes to many other elements to loosen their descriptions slightly. This paper will introduce these new elements to TEI users who many not have had the chance to use them yet, as well as introduce potential uses for the encoding of object descriptions in TEI files. The paper will not, however, merely introduce these elements, but will also look at changes still to be done in the TEI Guidelines to fully support the description of objects. For example, much of the description content model is taken wholesale from that for describing manuscripts. The was based on the (with some important changes), and still has elements like in its content model. There are many changes that are still needed and this paper actively seeks to involve the community in designing these changes.

Highlighting Our Examples: encoding XML examples in pedagogical contexts

TEI2019 paper: The TEI Guidelines use the element throughout the prose and reference pages for containing XML examples. However, many TEI users know little about this element, and most don’t even realise that it is not even in the usual TEI namespace, but instead in a TEI examples namespace (http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples). Following on from my paper at TEI2018 (in which I proposed more detailed ways that the TEI Guidelines might handle examples more generally), this paper will look at possible improvements to the element, specifically designed for modern pedagogical uses. When creating TEI ODD customisations as local encoding manuals, users sometimes use to show how encoders should mark up particular textual phenomena, similar to the use in the Guidelines themselves. Expanding this element’s functionality could benefit not only the TEI Guidelines, but also all those who include snippets of XML markup in encoding manuals, slides, tutorials, exercises, or anything else possibly derived from (or exported to) a TEI source and beyond. Building on the kind of syntax highlighting we are familiar with in XML editors and code snippets online, this paper examines the need to highlight arbitrary portions of XML stored in an element. Whether encoding existing resources containing highlighting of XML or wanting to render modern born-digital pedagogical materials, the TEI Guidelines currently recommend no specific way to do this. This paper looks at a number of possible options for enabling the highlighting of markup, including embedding namespaced elements, out-of-line markup, and byte-offset coding. All of these are summarised, with the problems that they each face, not only in processing, but also in providing flexible methods to enable users to express existing or desired output rendition.

Digital Cultures IV: (Digital) Scholarly Editing

HSS8004: Qualitative Methods and Critical Analysis in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Option 8: Digital Cultures IV: Scholarly Editing In this session the creation of scholarly editions will be introduced with an exploration of how the production of editions in the digital world has changed the requirements for a digital edition to be considered scholarly. The main standard in this area are the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), recommendations for encoding digital text from any time period, in any language and writing system. This session will give an overview of the TEI Guidelines and how they might be used to create a scholarly digital edition.

Digital Editing: text encoding, software, and the risks of failure

"Digital Editing: text encoding, software, and the risks of failure" A talk for the Brontë Editing Colloquium, Durham University, 12-14 June 2018; given 14 June 2018.

Behind the curtain: probing the inner workings of digital humanities projects

Behind the curtain: probing the inner workings of digital humanities projects, Talk for REED:London / DH@UGuelph, Thursday 22 March 2018.CC+BY

TEI Metadata with Manuscript Description

A workshop presentation of TEI Metadata and Manuscript Description

What do you expect from a digital edition?

A short talk about digital scholarly editions

A World of Difference: Myths and misconceptions about the TEI

A World of Difference: Myths and misconceptions about the TEI; Dr James Cummings; DH 2017; Friday 11 August 2017

TEI for Transcription

A TEI workshop presentation on TEI for Transcription, Editing, and Representing Primary Sources

TEI Infrastructure for Creation, Collaboration, and Publication

A workshop presentation of TEI Infrastructure for Creation, Collaboration and Publication

An Introduction to XML, Markup and the TEI

A workshop presentation on the Markup, XML, and the TEI

The Text Encoding Initiative and best practices for encoding text in digital documentary editions

A paper for the International Conference of Editors of Diplomatic Documents, 2017-04-18

Named Entities: People, Places, and Organisations

A TEI Workshop presentation on Named Entities. CC+By

DH Training and Learning Opportunities in Oxford

DH Training and Learning Opportunities in Oxford; for an Introduction to Digital Humanities for Humanities Oxford DPhil students, 2017-02-14

TEI Infrastructure for Creation, Collaboration, and Publication

A talk for the Methodologies in Digital Humanities (Text Encoding Initiative Public Day) 2017-02-08 http://www.ff.cuni.cz/methodologies-in-dh/

SRO - Intro to XML, Markup and the TEI

A workshop presentation on the TEI

The View From Here: TEI

TEI Metadata - MCA

A workshop presentation of TEI Metadata and Manuscript Description

TEI Structure and Basic Core Components - MCA

A workshop presentation on the TEI Structure and Basic Core Components

livingstone

The TEI Community, Resources, and Other Courses

The TEI Community, Resources, and Other Courses -- a brief workshop talk.

Customising the TEI for your project

An introductory workshop talk on customising the TEI.

TEI Structure and Basic Core Components

A workshop presentation on the TEI Structure and Basic Core Components

Freedom to constrain: Introducing TEI customisation

Freedom to constrain: Introducing TEI customisation; A lecture for @UCLDH on 2016-10-12; https://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/events/archive/cummings

TEI Unlimited

Why the TEI may not be as limited as you think; Dr James Cummings; ESTS 2016 Friday 7 October 2016.

Purifying and Simplifying: Advanced TEI Customization

Purifying and Simplifying: Advanced TEI Customization

Intensive Introduction to XSLT

An Intensive Introduction to XSLT for Transforming XML

Advanced XPath: Using XPath Functions

"Advanced XPath: Using XPath Functions" for pre-exist-db refresher course in Maynooth.