Olivia Bennison 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 Olivia's experience at the summer school here:
I like to think of myself as one of those 'hip, new researchers' who conducts interdisciplinary research and uses mixed methods. My master's degree was a Social and Economic History course with a focus on research methods and so, in my opinion, I feel relatively comfortable when faced with new methodologies and analytic frameworks. One thing I had never dipped my toe into, however, was Digital Humanities. It always felt to me like a buzzword that had no specific meaning but was used to catch the eye of assessors. But I wanted to know more. So, when the opportunity arose to attend the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) strand at Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, I was excited to sign up.
My DPhil research uses a variety of sources from the seventeenth century to assess how the British Civil Wars (1642-1651) impacted the experience of physical disability. My primary source base is the sources digitised by the Civil War Petitions Project team on their website. This website hosts over 3,000 petitions that I am going through and analysing looking at factors such as the language of disability, the employment status of petitioners, and the support available to disabled veterans. Having never heard of TEI before, I was going through these petitions and extracting the relevant information into an external database. I hoped that this course may give me an alternative to that.
The TEI strand offered a five-day 'crash course' which would leave participants 'ready to use TEI in your own research projects'. Naturally, I was sceptical - I knew absolutely nothing. The first day introduced us to the basics - what actually was TEI? I started from ground zero, but by the end of the day, I knew what I was getting myself into and was able to create my own, albeit short, TEI document. Each day added to my knowledge, slowly building my confidence and my ability to create more complex documents. We learned about the importance of a TEI header, how to mark up texts with information that is important to you, the intricacies of different modules on the TEI guidelines including correspondence and manuscript description, and most importantly for me, we learned about how to use TEI for analysis using XPath. By the end of the week, I was using my free time during sessions to apply what I had learned to my own projects by marking up some of the petitions I was analysing.
It wasn't all work, however. The week was filled with networking opportunities to chat with other people on the course. We, of course, talked about each other's research and how we were planning on using TEI going forward. But we also created a lovely, supportive environment where we were keen to help each other out when we got confused or celebrate our wins when we figured out how to do something new.
Going forward, I'm really excited to use TEI in my thesis. I think the analysis opportunities it gives will really enhance my interrogation of the sources and it will add a whole new layer to my research. As a result I am so grateful to the bursary scheme and my funders the OOC DTP for the opportunity to attend the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School.
