DHOXSS 2024 - Introduction to TEI strand

Alison Ray was awarded a bursary to attend the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School in 2024.  To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Alison's experience at the summer school here:

In August 2024, I was delighted to take part in the ‘Introduction to TEI’ strand of DHOxSS led by Yasmin Faghihi and Huw Jones from the University of Cambridge and Matthew Holford from the Bodleian Library. 

Photo by Alison Ray

From my perspective as an Oxford college archivist, it was a fantastic experience to learn more about the Text Encoding Initiative and its use from leading heritage professionals. This meant that our training in markup, XML, TEI, and editing was tailored towards attendees working and studying in the humanities, and how we could apply our training to our own workflows and research. Each day, we had our technical training in the structure and elements of TEI as well as workshops with guest speakers demonstrating how they put these skills into practice in their research projects, from editing medieval manuscripts to transcribing the correspondence of Charles Darwin. I additionally attended an optional ‘Enriching Exhibition Stories’ module that gave a useful demonstration the digital exhibition tool Quire.

The course broadened my knowledge of how TEI is used in cataloguing collections and building datasets for cultural and heritage institutions, and the bursary made my attendance possible as a GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) worker. It is designed very much for beginners in mind, requiring just your laptop and the Oxygen XML Editor software to take part in the course. Yasmin, Huw, and Matthew are amazing instructors and kindly gave their time to help us with steps in the coursework as well as providing us with advice on getting started in our own projects to follow on from the training. I now feel confident to put my training into practice by developing new TEI descriptions of Lincoln College’s medieval charters as a pilot project and facilitating student projects to catalogue and transcribe pre-modern records in the College’s collections. These tasks will make our collections more widely accessible to interested audiences as well as provide students with experience in handling documents and using digital tools in heritage work. 

Photo by Alison Ray

I certainly recommend the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School for culture and heritage professionals looking to explore new ways of sharing their collections with academic and public audiences, and the ‘Introduction to TEI’ strand in particular was incredibly useful for my interests in using TEI and XML to enrich my archival resources and finding aids. I additionally enjoyed the course format of an in-person summer school, as I got to spend time during the week with other humanities researchers and heritage colleagues from a wide range of international institutions, so it was a wonderful opportunity to learn from each other as well as our amazing convenors!