Dear Marjorie,
I totally agree with this approach. Although I have as yet very little practical teaching experience in this area, I am thinking about developing a module on using IT for humanities research for doctoral students. The approach I was planning to take is to teach them to program in Perl to process plain texts and TEI encoded documents (using the XML:Twig library). Instead of teaching Perl from scratch I would give them working little programs which they can then modify to suit their needs (a recipe book approach). I would also provide them with some basic XSLT and CSS, just enough to visualise the (original and processed) data in a browser. I think that a procedural language like Perl is easier to grasp than XSLT and to learn. Your suggestion of using packaged tools is certainly something I will now consider too.
It may well be that I am expecting too much from humanities reseachers, in terms of teaching them to program. I'd be interested to hear of people who've done something similar.
Best,
Godfried
-----Original Message----- From: dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca [mailto:dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of Marjorie Burghart Sent: 27 January 2011 23:15 To: dm-l@uleth.ca Subject: [dm-l] Teaching the TEI: your practice?
Dear Digital Medievalists,
I guess I can safely assume that several people here have an experience teaching the TEI, specifically to an audience of medievalists or historians. After teaching some workshops, I feel more and more that it is highly efficient to teach the TEI not alone, isolated, as a means to encode documents in a smart way, but putting the TEI XML at the center of the other technologies that make its interest immediately evident to the students. For instance, I have experienced that providing the students, when they're finished with their task of encoding a critical edition, with the Version Machine on the one hand and another set of XSLT producing a classic, print-like view of their document greatly helps them understanding not only what encoding is for, but also what they have been doing so far. I am even pondering whether or not including the use of eXist-db in a forthcoming course (which might be pushing it a bit far, I admit). Of course, since XSLT or XQuery are not really easy to grasp in a short period for people without any technical background, and it is not really evident to introduce them to the subtleties of those technologies. Still, it's probably good if the students get some idea of how technologies work together, instead of putting all their trust into the magic IT people will work on their smartly encoded TEI documents to "put them on the web" :)
I would be interested in a feedback of your practice: do you, when you teach the TEI, feel the need / manage to integrate notions about other tools and technologies of the XML family? And if so, how do you do that (proper introduction to XSLT? use of packaged tools like the v-machine? etc.).
Just curious :)
Marjorie