Re: A question about encoding and text fixing platforms for undergraduate curators

+1 for the ducks-to-water claim from me. We've been teaching students 
XML for years, and I've never had a single instance where a student 
struggled with it at all. It takes a matter of a couple of hours to get 
people into basic encoding.

XML is not hard. Word, by contrast, is a concoction of frustrations, and 
getting DOCX into decent TEI when you're done is horribly difficult.

Cheers,
Martin

On 2017-04-26 05:23 PM, Martin Mueller wrote:
> They’re not working at the Folger. They’ll be working at Northwestern,
> though using the Web-based Folger platform is a possible option. You’re
> right in saying that the students may not know Word all that well.  I
> would like to believe that students take to angle brackets like ducks to
> water and for what it’s worth, I much prefer working with the text mode
> in oXygen and haven’t found much use for the author mode. Still, I’ll
> need more persuading on the ducks to water claim.
>
>
>
>
>
> *From: *Elisa Beshero-Bondar <[email protected]>
> *Date: *Wednesday, April 26, 2017 at 7:10 PM
> *To: *Martin Mueller <[email protected]>
> *Cc: *"[email protected]" <[email protected]>
> *Subject: *Re: A question about encoding and text fixing platforms for
> undergraduate curators
>
>
>
> HI Martin,
>
> If you have students coming for **six weeks** to work at the Folger, why
> not orient them to writing and working the code? I work regularly with
> undergrads, and it takes about one week for them to orient themselves to
> angle brackets and oXygen. Also, I don’t believe that most undergrads
> “know” Microsoft Word especially well. Why create extra work with making
> Microsoft styles force-fit to plain simple sparse code?
>
>
>
> In my experience (regularly, from Fall 2012 onward), students take like
> ducks to the water and tend to appreciate working directly with the
> angle bracket code. Seems to me a six week institute is a perfect
> opportunity to teach them to code as part of the experience!
>
>
>
> Elisa
>
> --
> Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD
> Director, Center for the Digital Text | Associate Professor of English
> University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg | Humanities Division
> 150 Finoli Drive
> Greensburg, PA  15601  USA
> E-mail: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
> Development site: http://newtfire.org
> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__newtfire.org&d=DwMFaQ&c=yHlS04HhBraes5BQ9ueu5zKhE7rtNXt_d012z2PA6ws&r=rG8zxOdssqSzDRz4x1GLlmLOW60xyVXydxwnJZpkxbk&m=0N_RpCVwzbACojeKb6dxzlY1NOGShq0zdjRJGs8TXZs&s=WyRipKNOZ5-njOhfp8fI4VMyK3oV4rHCqhyHXKumRac&e=>
>
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>     On Apr 26, 2017, at 7:09 PM, Martin Mueller
>     <[email protected]
>     <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     I’m not sure whether this is a sensible question to ask, but I’ll
>     ask it anyhow.
>
>
>
>     This summer we’ll have a number of undergraduate curators of TCP
>     texts fixing this and that, mainly incompletely transcribed words,
>     but sometimes longer stretches of text or whole pages.
>
>
>
>     So we’ll some transcription platform in addition to an eXist site
>     at http://shc.earlprint.org
>     <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__shc.earlprint.org_&d=DwMFaQ&c=yHlS04HhBraes5BQ9ueu5zKhE7rtNXt_d012z2PA6ws&r=rG8zxOdssqSzDRz4x1GLlmLOW60xyVXydxwnJZpkxbk&m=0N_RpCVwzbACojeKb6dxzlY1NOGShq0zdjRJGs8TXZs&s=eaGdmgiKyJYQbrj6Usf_L8n1Pyh63t6FzbkZzAX7BLc&e=>,
>     where single words can be fixed by changing the value of the content
>     to of a <w> element, mercifully invisible to the user.
>
>
>
>     If you believe that the best tool is the tool you know best, you’d
>     try to figure out whether undergraduates could do this work using
>     Microsoft Word with a set of styles that subsequently support the
>     automatic transformation of the Microsoft word passages into XML
>     fragments that can be fitted into the TCP transcriptions.
>
>
>
>     Is that a plausible scenario and has something like that been done?
>     TCP encoding is quite sparse. Text is either marked (inside <hi>) or
>     unmarked, and the transcription is silent about what the unmarked
>     state is.  My rough guess is that a dozen elements will cover the
>     vast majority of cases.
>
>
>
>     The Folger Library has an attractive Web-based tool for manuscript
>     transcription that can probably be adjusted with little trouble.
>
>
>
>     The students will be in residence for six weeks, and it may be that
>     we should teach them encoding with oXygen. Some of them may love it,
>     others may hate it.
>
>
>
>     I’d be grateful for advice and practical war stories about what does
>     and does not work.
>
>
>