Julia Flanders photo

Julia Flanders

Brown University Library
@julia_flanders
MITH Conference Room
Friday, September 21, 2012
3:30 pm
co-sponsored by the Department of English

The TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS) is tackling one of the trickiest problems of scholarly text encoding. How can we provide robust, large-scale TEI publication services, while accommodating the detailed scholarly insight that makes TEI such a valuable tool for the digital humanities? What level of customization and variation can we support without compromising on interoperability, and what are the mechanisms by which we can achieve the optimal balance? And who needs variation anyway—what kinds of scholarly insight are at stake, or at risk?

TAPAS seeks to offer long-term TEI repository and publishing services, with special focus on supporting scholars who lack access to XML publishing infrastructure or expertise at their own institutions. Supported by a planning grant from the IMLS and now by a two-year IMLS National Leadership Grant and an NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant, the TAPAS service will make it possible for scholars to use TEI in their teaching and research without mastering the full suite of XML technologies. The service will also provide access to consulting, training, documentation, and community-developed tools. This talk will explore the conceptual and strategic challenges in developing TAPAS, and in particular the problem of how to harmonize—or transcend—divergent approaches to TEI encoding.

Julia Flanders is the Director of the Women Writers Project,  part of the Center for Digital Scholarship in the Brown University Library. She is also editor-in-chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly, an online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal of digital humanities, and has served in a variety of positions within the Text Encoding Initiative, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, centerNet, and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Her research focuses on text encoding, digital methods of scholarly communication, and the politics of labor in the digital academy.

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues webpage.

Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions. Viewers can watch the live stream as well.

All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: MITH (mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 301.405.8927).