Digital Editions in Practice, Tufts University, May 31–June 1, 2019

The Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University will host a two-day workshop that provides an overview of a sample, practical digital editions creation workflow. This will feature both an open-lecture component led by developers and expert users of advanced technologies and “hands-on” sessions for participants that offer in-depth demonstrations of select tools and technologies as well as discussions tailored to the attendees.

While the final schedule will depend upon the interests of applicants, topics may include:

• Get started with IIIF: You want to represent regions (portions of written text, part of a map or other illustration) in images of an inscription, papyrus, manuscript or printed book using the International Image Interoperability Framework (https://iiif.io/).
• Better OCR for challenging texts: You want to generate machine readable text from a print book but commercial OCR software does not provide useful results for your source materials (e.g., early modern printed books, books printed in Ancient Greek, Arabic, or Persian, et al.). You will be able to work with developers to train state-of-the-art OCR software on your chosen materials.
• Develop a linguistic database: You want to develop a linguistic database for your source text that includes dependency parsing and/or co-reference annotation as a means to improve accuracy, support collaborative annotation, or assist in language instruction.
• Online publishing with CTS: You have a text that you would like to publish in the new Scaife Viewer (https://scaife.perseus.org/) or a similar framework. You will have an opportunity to learn how to construct TEI XML texts that conform to the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol for long-term, CTS-based, digital library integration.
• Place-mapping: You want to analyze the place names that appear in a source text. You can learn how to annotate geographic references not only in English but also in languages such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Persian.
• Personal names and social networks: You want to analyze the people that appear in a source text. You can learn how to annotate references to people, to use the annotations to create social networks and to explore those relationships visually, and to connect the visualizations to the source texts from which they are drawn.
• Topic-modeling: You want to use automated methods to identify ideas within a text or a collection. Perhaps statistical methods will uncover patterns that previous researchers have missed or you have a corpus that is simply too big for traditional close reading. You will have an opportunity to learn how to apply topic modeling to your text or corpus.
• The Classical Language Toolkit (http://cltk.org/): You are comfortable working with the Python programming language and you want to learn how to exploit the Classical Language Toolkit. You will have an opportunity to get started applying CLTK to your own materials.

Although many of our examples will draw upon pre-modern textual corpora, we invite applicants who have worked (or propose to work) with digital corpora or digital editions in any humanities field or discipline. We encourage applications from graduate students, library and museum professionals, post-docs or researchers, and faculty. Areas of particular emphasis include undergraduate research; broader humanities outreach; international collaboration; and online teaching (such as the SunoikisisDC model). We particularly seek participants who work with or are open to working with open-source or openly-licensed materials.

Accepted participants will be reimbursed for travel including transportation, lodging, and a per diem for meals and incidentals at the discretion of the Perseus Digital Library. Travel expenses may be capped and are subject to review. No additional stipends are available.