Creating Digital Scholarly Editions

(1 Credit Hour) · Undergraduate

Scholars create new editions of older texts for numerous reasons, building on a tradition that dates back centuries. Modern computing enables scholars to pursue the same rigor in creating editions while making their work more accessible to broader audiences and more open to reuse and further interpretation. Students in this course will learn how to create scholarly editions in a digital format using the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI), a durable standard built on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) for documenting distinctive features of documents. They will learn core concepts of digital text markup alongside key conventions of textual scholarship, and will explore the implications of representing document features at various levels of specificity, experiencing editorial work as a close reading practice and an interpretive practice. Literary/historical texts, medieval and modern, will be used to test out concepts, and students will complete a final project from either a pre-selected text or a text of their own choosing. While the course is computer heavy, no prior programming experience is required.