Georgie Anderson was awarded a bursary to attend the TEI strand of the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School in 2025. To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Georgie's experience at the summer school here:
I am a CHASE AHRC DPhil candidate at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent whose thesis currently titled Tracing the Figure of the Black Knight in Chivalric Romances from North-Atlantic Europe uses a literary and codicological analysis to assess ideas of race and race-making in the premodern. To do so I catalogue my corpus of manuscripts – with a focus on materiality – and use the data to create GIS maps to track the spread of both manuscript and associated texts. To make the transfer of data easier I planned to use TEI to create my manuscript catalogues and descriptions. As digital methods played such a key role in my thesis, I am extremely thankful to both Gale and the University of Oxford for selecting me to be in receipt of a bursary for this year’s summer school.
I went into the summer school with a clear goal of what I wanted and needed from the five days, and it delivered above and beyond my expectations. When I entered the ‘classroom’ on the first day for the Introduction to TEI strand I was greeted with a warm welcome from the convenors - Huw, Yasmin and Matthew - who immediately made us all feel at home, from here I knew the week would only get better. It was clear as we moved through the course it was set up to help true beginners get the most out of TEI – not just how to use XML editors and work within the TEI guidelines, but most importantly, how these skills can be used to further our own work. This was most apparent through the afternoon sessions, where other speakers were invited to share the work they have done using TEI on projects from DPhil research to huge, funded projects from the Darwin Correspondance Project to the Newton Project. As someone who has ideas of turning their PhD research into a wider public project, hearing from those who had worked on large scale projects gave me renewed and extended enthusiasm that this was possible.
An added bonus of attending DHOxSS was connecting with others from across the globe in varying fields and disciplines over our shared love of knowledge and learning (and our despair over learning XPath for the first time). As we got to chat over tea and coffee during the breaks and continue these talks over lunch or in the pub after the sessions, I have come away with new forged connections with people who share similar research problems and work at so many varied institutions. I’ve come away from the summer school with more focused idea of where digital skills can take my project and give me further tools for my future in academia. Even more excitingly it has laid the foundation for a future placement which utilises my new found TEI skillset with my existing passion for manuscripts and all things medieval.
