TEI vs the ChalkfaceReflections and Issues in Teaching TEI

Dr Melissa TerrasLecturer in Electronic CommunicationSchool of Library, Archive and Information StudiesUniversity College Londonm.terras@ucl.ac.ukhttp://www.ucl.ac.uk/SLAIS/melissa-terras/

TEI vs the Chalkface

• TEI and courses• What is wrong with the current

picture?– How can we encourage more

people to learn TEI– How can we improve current

materials– How can it be integrated into

more taught courses• Teaching Approaches and

Methods• TEI by Example

Types of course

• Short courses– Humanities Computing, Electronic Text

• ALLC sponsored week long workshop at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, SA• Final Year Undergraduate course

– Humanities Computing, Electronic Text• Semester long course at University of Antwerp

• MA level modules– Digital Resources in the Humanities– EAD and TEI– XML

• Term long courses in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London

• Online Material?

Who are these taught to?

• Students in Literature and Language– Other Humanities based

students• Students in Library, Archives,

and Electronic Communication and Publishing

• Librarians and Archivists• Academics wishing to join the

digital revolution• Individuals who may go onto

teach or inform others

Differences?

• Short courses vs term long courses– Often cover the same amount and scope of material– However, longer, part time courses allow for material to “sink in”– Short term courses are rarely assessed

• How do you know that the students have really learnt anything useful that will be retained?

• What happens when the intensity of the course ends and students go back to their own habits?

• What happens when the motivational tutors are no longer around to ask when things go wrong?

– Is assessment or setting of practical exercises necessary to teach TEI well?

Expert led teaching

• Experts are notoriously bad at describing what they are expert at

• Being a good scholar and good teacher are not the same thing

• Short courses suffer from “shortness”

– Lack of support after– Lack of development of

teacher/student relationship– Assessment and feedback– Lack of development of teaching

materials

How do assessed courses work? • Humanities Computing: Electronic Text

– Structure of course: holistic approach to teaching

• History of computing• History of Internet Technologies• Problems with proprietary formats• Need for markup• History of markup• SGML, XML• -> TEI and DALF• Digitization• XSLT

– 30 Contact Hours, 4 credits– Students work on a group project to digitize,

transcribe, markup (in TEI) and produce an electronic edition of previously unpublished correspondence.

– http://www.kantl.be/ctb/vanhoutte/teach/hc2005.htm

Course Material 2005/6

• This year, concentrated on the DALF specification for the encoding of correspondence material and the students will prepare an electronic edition of the correspondence in two unique collections of the Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland (US):

• The Papers of John T. Whalen (1898-1980) consist of fifty-five letters written by Whalen to his mother in Mt. Hebron, Maryland, between 1917 and 1918, when Whalen was in the U. S. Army during World War I. The letters inquire about family matters and describe his life as a member of the Coast Artillery Corps and as a patient in the hospital.

•  The Papers of Theodore Bissell contain six letters written by Milton Ellsworth Poole, a University of Maryland student who left school to fight in France during World War I."

Success of such a course?

• Edward Vanhoutte is an expert in TEI. He uses personally developed course materials.

• Structured, historical overview, complemented by increasingly difficult practical tasks and a practical project

• Many students go on to work in the cultural and heritage industry/academia in XML and textual scholarship

• This is one model of a University course.

– What can we do to encourage more like it?

Holistic approach to teachingFrom Bernold, L.E. Learning Oriented teaching and Academic Success, http://www2.ncsu.edu/CIL/CARL/Education/Classes/LearnResearch.html

Integration of TEI into overview courses on computing and the humanities? • Digital Humanities is not just TEI!• In introductory courses to the whole field (such as mine) you have two teaching slots to

introduce students to markup, XML and TEI– They may then have the option to take the subject further

• By choosing another more indepth course• By choosing it as the focus of independent study or dissertation• By taking it back to their workplace and choosing to pursue it further with their professional projects

• => Those two sessions are precious, and have to keep the students interested, and not scared off!

• A way to integrate TEI further into teaching at University level is to encourage short introductions in LIS courses

• There should be tutorial material that takes a few hours as a taster, rather than a full semester length course

• How do we assess courses such as these? – Old assessment at SLAIS

• No XSLT, no product• Left to their own devices…

Lets be a novice….• Might look up TEI on google and find http://www.tei-c.org/

TEI tutorials online??????

• Online teaching is fundamentally different from contact based teaching environments

• Just making available lecture notes is not enough

– Rarely make sense to the user– Intimidating rather than illuminating– Serve more to act as an archive for

the TEI for teaching activities than providing learning materials for those wishing to learn TEI unaided

http://www.afi.com/silver/new/nowplaying/2004/v1i12/images/Scream-of-Fear.jpg

Online Teaching vs face to face teaching?

• Online experience different than in the traditional classroom – because learners are different– the communication is via computer and World Wide Web– participation in classroom by learners are different– the social dynamic of the learning environment is changed– discrimination and prejudice is minimized – feedback mechanisms are changed– potential to reach wider audience– potential for re-use in other learning environments– Instructors should “master design and delivery strategies, techniques, and

methods for teaching online courses” – Yang and Cornelius (2005), Preparing Instructors for Quality Online Instruction, Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Volume VIII, Number I, Spring 2005,

http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring81/yang81.htm

Potential Audience for Introductory material?

• Vanhoutte, E. An Introduction to the TEI and the TEI Consortium. Literary and Linguistic Computing 2004 19(1):9-16.

• "This is followed by a short introduction by Edward Vanhoutte to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) in general. There are many such introductions to the TEI available both in print and on the web and this one is fine so far as it goes, but one may wonder about its appropriateness here, given that few readers of LLC are likely to be so unfamiliar with the TEI as to require such an introduction."

• Driscoll, M.J. (2005). 'Mats Dahlström, Espen S. ore, and Edward Vanhoutte, eds, Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 19, no. 1, April 2004'. In:  A.M. Hansen e.a. (eds.), /The Book as Artefact. Text and Border, /Variants - The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship 4/, /337-340

• Consistently one of the top ten requested articles from LLC over the last two years.

The self-directed learner

• Set goals to improve present performance• Control

– What, How, When• Make a commitment to work towards goals• Continuous self motivation• Question, inquire, problem solve• Scan data and quickly choose relevant

resources • Usually open learning or non-credit

programmes• Not for everyone!• Teachers still have a role

– Providing a learning environment– Providing access to good resources

• The TEI has opportunity to provide good learning and teaching materials for this sort of learner

• active development of tutorial materials was an initial objective of the TEI Training SIG

– lack of community contribution– consequently been abolished

http://www.birminghamfreepress.com/commercial/illustrations/Thinker.jpg

Example or Scenario based learning

• Confucius around 450 BC: – tell me, and I will forget – show me, and I may remember– involve me, and I will understand

• Reinforce learning• Identify gaps in learning• Overcome learning blocks• Change behaviour

http://uhavax.hartford.edu/moen/CourseMaterials.htm

Where are the goods?

• Why are examples of TEI marked up texts not readily available?

– Most easy way to demonstrate to students the power of TEI

– Most easy way to learn coding is from examples

• TEI wiki only has two sample texts• Even the OTA didn’t have TEI

marked up texts (of any granularity) available

• (is the TEI a theoretical exercise on principles and theory of textual markup?)

Images gratuitously stolen from amazon.co.uk

TEI by Example

• www.teibyexample.org• need for introductory training materials to text encoding

within the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) framework • on-line TEI course by example

– Will introduce novice users to text encoding within the TEI framework

– serve as an introductory teaching package for instructors • Additionally

– Make available a software toolkit for teaching text encoding to support interested trainers

TEIbyexample.org

• Developed by Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie-CTB)

• Sponsored by CCH, UCL, CTB– Endorsed by ALLC

• Managed by Edward Vanhoutte and me• Most development work will be carried out by Ron Van den

Branden• Large Advisory Committee• Preliminary scoping work done – will start 6 month

development period in November 2006

Devil is in the detail….

• What is TEI nowadays?– status of the TEI model

• Backward incompatible revision from P4 (2002) to P5 (200?) • Pros and cons of using p4?

+-

[TEI-external]: guaranteed adherence to well-established text encoding practice

Risk of quick obsolescence

So what about p5?

Pros and cons for adoption of P5 in the project:

+-

[TEI-external]: incentive for P5 adoption

Intrinsic instability

[TEI-internal]: thorough evaluation of practice + contents of selected chapters

Steep technical learning curve for novice text encoders (CVS / multiple expression formats / still maturing Schema software support)

Technical flexibility (Schema flavours but also DTD) and the ODD abstraction layer equally allow to concentrate on content (if this is an argument for novices)

 

Step-by-Step practical introduction to TEI

• Format of generic tutorials for web development– W3 Schools Web Tutorials: http://www.w3schools.com– Web Monkey: http://www.webmonkey.com– Code Walkers: http://www.codewalkers.com– IBM developerWorks http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/

• meta-introduction: objectives, prerequisites, system requirements • thematic introduction: high-level overview • step-by-step introduction of new markup: short text excerpts and examples • summary • download area: sample code • resources: links to background information and reference material

Providing users with an environment

• TEIbyexample will provide guidance on editors– code-based XML editing – validation (against DTD, Schema (varieties)) – XML-aware editing assistance (tag completion, context-sensitive

tag suggestion) – free – support for different operating systems – activity status: i.e. active maintenance and updates of the software

Providing users with examples

• the amount of digitally available TEI marked up text materials is not overwhelming

• => call for examples from projects• And also marking up of texts ourselves• Early talks with OTA suggest they may be a source for *unmarked up*

sections of text• prose, poetry, drama, manuscript transcription and scholarly editing • progressive in-depth illustration of few examples vs. a larger number

of different fragments • Might need copyright agreements to be made

Pedagogical Approach

• Example and instance led• Graded exercises of increasing difficulty• Tasks with feedback

– Quiz– Spot the error/difference etc– Common online software learning tools

• Databank of examples– Chose to stick with one example throughout?– Many examples of different texts?

Structure of Tutorials

 Chapters tutorial Chapters TEI P5 Additional literature

1 Introduction to text encoding and the TEI

1, 2, 3

Vanhoutte (2004), Morrison e.a. (2000), Sperberg-McQueen & Burnard (2002b)

2 The TEI header 5, 24

Morrison e.a. (2000), Vanhoutte (2000), Vanhoutte & Van den Branden (2002)

3 Prose 6, 7, 14, 20  

4 Poetry 6, 7, 8, 14, 20  

5 Drama 6, 7, 9, 14, 20  

6 Manuscript Transcription

6, 7, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20  

7 Scholarly Editing 6, 7, 14, 17, 19, 20  

8 Customizing TEI, ODD, Roma

27, 28, 29, 30Burnard (2005), Burnard & Cummings (2005)

Hosting, etc

• http://www.teibyexample.org and http://www.teibyexample.com

• Will be Hosted by CCH at Kings College London• Development updates will be hosted at CTB• http://www.kantl.be/ctb/project/2006/TBE-R001.ht

m• Initial Report Authored by Ron Van den Branden

Wider implications

• Provision of online course with material designed for online learning may mean more people– integrate TEI into their teaching– Provide links to it from Digital Humanities pages

• Increasing TEI’s visibility

– Attract new members to the community who may feel excluded by the nature of existing materials

TEI and the Chalkface

• TEI teachers have to be aware of teaching methodologies and appropriateness of materials

– For different mediums– For different audiences

• Divorce scholarly investigations from teaching• Promote an up to date, united front about TEI to the novice• Promote and provide materials suitable for online learning

– Encourage these to be integrated into teaching programmes– Expand focus of teaching to the LIS and Archive sector as well as traditional humanities focus

of TEI? • Hopefully this will lead to an increase in use of materials

– Increase in those using TEI– Increase in those teaching TEI– Increase in those who know about the TEI and can pass on knowledge to others