Oxygen XML Editor

To follow the guided exercises in this course, you will need to use the XML editor oXygen: https://www.oxygenxml.com/.

oXygen is one of the best XML editors currently available. It has many advantages over other editors: it is relatively easy to set up and to use, it is very powerful, cross-platform (e.g. it works on the Mac), relatively cheap and has many advanced features that show that the creators are keen to keep abreast of new developments in the XML world. Crucially, the developers have shown an unusually keen interest in the needs of humanities computing scholarship, in particular that which surrounds the Text Encoding Initiative.

Its main disadvantages are that it is not free (many XML editors are) and that its target audience seems to be developers (as opposed to, say, average users just needing to edit XML documents) and so it is not quite as easy to customise for less technical users as some of its more expensive competitors.

Each XML editor has its own advantages and disadvantages, but in editing XML-like documents, the chief functions you will need initially are the following:

• Checking for well-formedness. Does the document you are working on follow the basic syntax rules of XML?
• Validation. Does the XML document validate against the appropriate DTD or schema (if there is one)?
• Editing help. Different editors offer different kinds of help when editing documents: some show you which elements (or attributes) are available in a given position (according to the document’s DTD or schema), while others show you the internal structure of an XML document as a ‘tree’ diagram so that you can navigate quickly around it.

XML editors can look deceptively like Microsoft Word or other mainstream text processing programs. It is useful to have similar functionality as word processors (e.g. spelling checkers), but it is important to understand that XML editors are quite different, and that a good XML editor will concentrate on the features that XML enables.

One of the best free alternative to Oxygen may be the text editor Atom: https://atom.io/.
Although Atom does not provide an author view, XSLT transformations and XSLT debugging, it provides packages for autocompletion and on-the-fly validation of XML documents.

XML and TEI Encoding

Here are a few resources about XML and TEI encoding in general. The Guidelines are the point of reference for the Text Encoding Initiative, and you are strongly recommended to read the chapters on Representation of Primary Sources, the Critical Apparatus, and Names, Dates, People and Places. These are the chapters covered more in detail in this course.

The TEI website provides a gentle introduction to XML, which can be completed by David Birnbaum's "Even Gentler Introduction to XML". And Finally, TEI by Example offers a series of online tutorials with plenty of examples, interactive tests and exercises.

• TEI Guidelines: http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index.html
• A Gentle Introduction to XML: http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/SG.html
• An Even Gentler Introduction to XML: http://dh.obdurodon.org/what-is-xml.xhtml
• TEI by example: http://teibyexample.org/

Digital Scholarly Editing

The following links are more specifically related to digital scholarly editing.

The TEI Toolbox was created by Marjorie Burghardt as a tool for people preparing a natively digital TEI critical edition. The TEI Toolbox lets you check that your critical edition is properly encoded, and makes it possible to display parallel versions of a text. It also offers access to the TEI Zoner, a tool to annotate images.

Two catalogs record digital (scholarly) editions, which give you an idea of the range of possibilities provided by the digital format. If you are preparing a digital edition, these are also a great source of examples that you can browse to discover how others have dealt with the same kind of texts.

If any term related to scholarly editing is obscure, do not hesitate to consult the Lexicon of Scholarly Editing. It is an open access and multilingual resource that offers definitions for concepts in the field of scholarly editing and textual criticism.

• TEI Toolbox: http://ciham-digital.huma-num.fr/teitoolbox/
• Patrick Sahle's catalog of Digital Scholarly Editions: http://www.digitale-edition.de/
• Greta Franzini's catalog of Digital Editions: https://dig-ed-cat.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/
• Lexicon of Scholarly Editing: http://uahost.uantwerpen.be/lse/

Annotating Images

Here are a few tools that let you create TEI markup for images annotations. For more detail, take the optional module on Image Annotation.

• Image Markup Tool (PC only): https://tapor.uvic.ca/~mholmes/image_markup/
• InkScape: https://inkscape.org/en/
• Oxygen Plugin: https://github.com/oxygenxml/TEI-Facsimile-Plugin
• TEI Zoner: http://ciham-digital.huma-num.fr/teitoolbox/zoner.php

XML Transformation

Here are three resources to help you transform your TEI XML in other formats. 

• TEI boilerplate : http://dcl.ils.indiana.edu/teibp/
• XSL stylesheets for TEI XML: http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-xsl/
• Transforming Data for Reuse and Re-publication with XML and XSL: http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/transforming-xml-with-xsl

Bibliography

Here is a short bibliography, available from zotero here: https://www.zotero.org/groups/657121/dariahteach/items/collectionKey/TZSTKQ57.