Today was an exciting first day of the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer Seminar–I’m in the TEI stream, led by Sebastian Rahtz. Incidentally, I’m really happy with his teaching style, which is definitely lecture-based but is very conversational and filled with detailed examples in the presentation materials. The day is broken out into a lecture/discussion first, then a series of assignments or practical tasks, then another lecture/discussion and another hands-on session. I’m definitely going to draw on it next term, though I’m sure it entails much more preliminary work on his part. Of course, he has assistants and over 6 hours with us–a far cry from a single 1.25- or 2.5-hour class. The seminar is billed as “introductory,” but you really need to have a working sense of 1.) how markup works in general and 2.) the kind of syntactical exactitude and precision demanded for things to move along appropriately.
In the interests of documenting my progress, I’m posting my first validated XML file, a bare-bones rendering of The Tatler No. 238, from 1710, the facsimile of which was very kindly provided by Will via facebook. Here’s the gist of it!
Tonya Howe 