TEI and Humanities Pedagogy: Building TAPAS Classroom

FAIN: HD-248437-16

Northeastern University (Boston, MA 02115-5005)
Julia Hammond Flanders (Project Director: September 2015 to June 2022)

The development of a platform for teaching the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which would allow for shared instruction materials, collaborative teaching, student evaluation, all built within the NEH-funded TAPAS infrastructure.

Text markup with TEI is a key topic in the digital humanities classroom: it engages students in a close examination of text, discussion of interpretation, and inquiry into textual materiality. But the logistics can be challenging: tools for working with TEI/XML-encoded data require greater technical expertise than humanities faculty possess, and these tools are not designed with classroom needs in mind. TAPAS Classroom will offer instructors a centralized, user-friendly platform for organizing and sharing course materials, with features to support group analysis, display, and commenting on TEI assignments. The platform will enable both quick previewing of TEI files and sustained engagement and analysis. As part of the TAPAS framework, TAPAS Classroom will enable users to share assignments and supporting materials with the entire TEI community, and projects can also be migrated into TAPAS proper. TAPAS Classroom situates TEI pedagogy at the heart of the TEI research community.

Associated Products

TAPAS Project (Web Resource)
Title: TAPAS Project
Author: Julia Hammond Flanders
Abstract: TAPAS is the TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service hosted by Northeastern University Library's Digital Scholarship Group.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://tapasproject.org/

TAPAS Classroom: Experiments with TEI in Humanities pedagogy (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: TAPAS Classroom: Experiments with TEI in Humanities pedagogy
Author: Julia Flanders
Author: Syd Bauman
Author: Ashley Clark
Author: Ben Doyle
Author: William Reed Quinn
Abstract: An important dimension of digital humanities pedagogy involves engaging students with what lies “under the hood”: with the intellectual architecture of familiar tools and resources. Text markup is an especially compelling topic in the literature and history classroom, for a number of reasons. It engages students in a very close analytical examination of the text, and makes the results of that examination explicit. It prompts a discussion of how we read and interpret documents and for what purpose. It supports inquiry into textual materiality, the significance of print cultures, and historical contexts of primary source documents. It offers an introduction to basic methods of editing, annotation, and explication, and it offers an introduction to a set of tools that are increasingly central to digital humanities scholarship—which have significant professional value outside the academy as well. For all of these reasons, the TEI is a tool of growing importance and pedagogical value for the humanities classroom. The TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS) offers a repository-based framework for scholars to publish and archive their TEI-encoded materials, including scholarly editions, text anthologies, digitized archival materials, historical papers, manuscripts, and a wide range of other TEI data.
Date: 11/15/2017
Primary URL: https://hcmc.uvic.ca/tei2017/abstracts/t_137_flanders_tapasclassroom.html
Conference Name: TEI 2017

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