Antwerp DH Summer School 2023 – Computer-assisted genetic editing: from handwritten text recognition to keystroke logging

Intensive 5-day entry level hands-on course on making digital editions of analogue and born-digital texts. In this course, participants will acquire a set of basic computer skills such as XML and handwritten text recognition to design a TEI-compatible Digital Scholarly Edition and deploy keystroke logging technology to record and analyse born-digital texts. 

Registration information:

• Early bird registration deadline: 10 April 2023.
• Regular registration deadline: 30 April 2023.

For more information and registration, please visit the website.

preliminary programme

MONDAY | Introduction and Digital Scholarly Editing

Digital Scholarly editing, theory and practice, HTR, XML

We will start the week with the theoretical background of digital scholarly editing and handwritten text recognition.

TUESDAY | Handwritten Text Recognition

Transkribus, TEI-XML

On the second day, we will recap what we have learned about HTR, and we will focus more specifically on the workflow in Transkribus. Then, we will do a creative exercise: writing a short story by hand. This will be the material to work with during the day as we will run the HTR model to ‘transcribe’ your own handwriting. In the end, we will export the results in TEI-XML.

WEDNESDAY | Keystroke Logging

Inputlog, keystroke logging, TEI-XML

On the third day, we will build upon the creative exercise of Tuesday: we will revise the short story on the computer and logging the writing process with a keystroke logger. We will then use these keystroke logging files to learn the basic technologies involved in making a (genetic) digital edition. As a first step, we will encode all the textual operations (e.g., new text production, additions, deletions) in TEI-XML together with the timestamps of each operation. These XML files will be used the next day as we move on to the visualisation of the reconstructions of the digital writing processes.

THURSDAY | eXist-db

eXist-db app, HTML, CSS

On the fourth day, we will learn the basics of working with eXist-db. After jointly installing eXist-db, we will use a pre-made eXist-db application, which can visualise the keystroke logging transcription. In the afternoon we will visit a museum.

FRIDAY | Visualising Manuscripts and Born-Digital Writing Processes

XPath, XSLT, HTML, CSS

On the last day, we will build upon what we have learned in the eXist-db session to visualise the writing process. We will learn the basics of XPath and XSLT as well as HTML and CSS, to make modifications to the existing visualisation. We will end the day with a final discussion.