XQuery Summer Institute: Advancing XML-Based Scholarship from Representation to Discovery

FAIN: HT-50080-13

Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN 37203-2416)
Clifford Blake Anderson (Project Director: March 2013 to April 2015)

This two-week summer institute at Vanderbilt would train 12 participants in the techniques and methodologies of XQuery language, which allows for searching and manipulating texts encoded in XML.

The XQuery Summer Institute at Vanderbilt University will be aimed at archivists, librarians, professors, and students who have experience marking up texts in XML, but do not yet know how to work computationally with those documents. Our institute aspires to recruit twelve members of the digital humanities community to a two week institute in June 2014. The faculty of the institute will teach participants to work productively with their XML-encoded texts using XQuery, a programming language designed specifically for XML. With XQuery, scholars can learn a single language to ingest their texts into an XML database, ask questions of them, connect them with other sources of information, and publish them on the web. Participants will go beyond using XML for representation to querying XML for discovery.

Associated Products

On Teaching XQuery to Digital Humanists (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: On Teaching XQuery to Digital Humanists
Author: Clifford B. Anderson
Abstract: XQuery provides an excellent means for teaching programming to digital humanists because it works seamlessly with their existing XML data, has an elegant and simple core with a well-structured standard library, and can be used in conjunction with XML databases to develop end-to-end web applications. However, current teaching materials for XQuery do not address the needs of digital humanists, presupposing implicit knowledge of programming concepts that they frequently lack. Based on experience teaching XQuery to digital humanists (including alt-ac professionals, archivists, faculty members, graduate students, and librarians) in three distinct settings: a weekly training session for librarians, a graduate seminar on digital humanities, and a two week NEH-supported Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities, I suggest how the XML community might develop resources to widen the appeal and accessibility of XQuery.
Date: 8/8/2014
Primary URL: http://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol13/html/Anderson01/BalisageVol13-Anderson01.html
Primary URL Description: Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2014
Conference Name: Balisage: The Markup Conference 2014

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