Workshop - "Code and Collation: Training Textual Scholars"
We are pleased to announce a three-day workshop Code and Collation: Training Textual Scholars that takes place in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) from 2 through 4 November 2016. The event is part of the DiXiT network and is hosted by the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands. It brings together a group of international experts from the fields of textual scholarship and computer science.
The workshop engages with the theory and practice of semi-automated collation and provides an intense training in the open source collation program CollateX. Participants will learn how to prepare source materials, how to perform semi-automated collation using CollateX, and how to inspect and modify the results; they will acquire or improve computational skills relevant to textual criticism and in particular to the production of scholarly editions.
Description
‘Laborious’, ‘error-prone’, ‘painstaking’ and ‘time-consuming’: collation, a core activity of textual scholarship, is generally described using these terms. Not incidentally, efforts to automate it began as early as scholarly editors started working with digital technologies. There exist currently a number of collation programs able to process a large amount of witnesses at high speed. However, these programs often function as a ‘black box’: their users are unaware of the transformations the text undergoes, nor do they know how to influence the procedure. The workshop provides a hands-on training in computational skills and in particular in the open-source program CollateX. It addresses the collation of both plain texts and XML-encoded texts, and in particular the possibility of keeping XML markup during the collation process, instead of ‘stripping’ the files before collating.
Previous collation workshops, such as the collation workshop in Brussels (2009) and the ‘collation summit’ in Münster (2014), offered participants an introduction in digital collation technologies and illustrated the scholarly theories behind collation with examples from editing projects. In line with the most recent workshop on collation, held in Sydney (2015), the present workshop focuses on the practical aspects of computer-supported collation. These aspects bring to light new textual challenges, and as such they remain based in editorial theory. The underlying topic of the workshop is the knowledge transfer between humanities scholars and information scientists. In this perspective, the envisioned outcome is two-fold. First, to gain a better understanding and a critical awareness of how computational programs can be used in textual research. Second, to emphasise the value of a fruitful collaboration between trained computer scientists and computer-literate humanists.
Instructors
-
Tara Andrews (University of Bern)
-
Gioele Barabucci (University of Cologne)
-
David J. Birnbaum (University of Pittsburgh)
-
Ronald Haentjens Dekker (Huygens ING)
-
Leif-Jöran Olsson (University of Gothenburg)
-
Joris van Zundert (Huygens ING)
Venue
Accommodation
Hotels near Amsterdam Central Station:
Contact
Please do not hesitate to contact us:
dixitcollation [at] gmail [dot] com
dixitcollation@gmail.com
The workshop will be hosted by the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (KNAW) and is funded by the Marie Curie ITN "DiXiT". Organizers: Elli Bleeker (University of Antwerp), Peter Boot (Huygens ING), Ronald H. Dekker (Huygens ING), Elena Spadini (Huygens ING). |