Magdalena Turska – Requirements for a publication infrastructure

Hello, my name is Magdalena Turska, I’m in Oxford for two weeks now, trying to settle in a bit and set up foundations for next 19 months of my fellowship. What will I do over here?

The rapidly developing field of digital humanities already sports well established standards like TEI but is still in need of infrastructure and resources. And supposedly this is where I fit in. My primary task would be to develop a model of reusable components for a publication infrastructure – surveying the existing tools and frameworks, requesting improvements and implementing new components. These are still early days, but going from vague and abstract to concrete: I’ll be certainly improving the TEI – oXygen  framework, TEI Stylesheets and TEI ODD meta-schema language, creating proof-of-concept digital edition of my own somewhere along the way.

Before coming here I’ve worked for University of Warsaw, Poland. I co-authored the Internet publication of Corpus of Ioannes Dantiscus Texts & Correspondence (http://dantiscus.ibi.uw.edu.pl), a digital edition of correspondence and other written works of renaissance poet and diplomat Ioannes Dantiscus (over 6,000 letters, mostly Latin and German and ca 1,000 other documents). I were the sole person responsible for all technical issues – from design to implementation and user training. I created all the software used in the Registration and Publication of the Correspondence of Ioannes Dantiscus research project. Texts in the corpus are TEI/XML files with encoding that covers critical apparatus and commentary necessary for the printed editions of the texts. Hopefully this experience will help me to fulfill my DiXiT tasks.

I’m looking forward to meeting y’all in Cambridge soon.

Cambridge presentation