I have questions about: TEI/XML (or other markup solutions) as a tool for teaching and research, including for right-to-left Unicode (Hebrew) but also just English. Depending on the skill levels of those who show up, this session could be “Make” session in which we pool our knowledge into a shared resource for further learning, or a “Teach” or “Play” session if someone shows up with commanding knowledge and a will to lead.

My own goals: I would like to be able to mark up plain-text Unicode Hebrew and English with tags of my own making, and assist my students in doing the same. I would like to be able to create simple programs or Regular Expressions to manipulate this marked-up plain text in simple ways. For a research-related example: I would like to be able to mark up Biblical Hebrew poems with varying suggestions for line-breaks (or verbal expressions, or accentual beats, or parallel expressions, etc.) and then manipulate the results for different kinds of display. For a teaching-related example: I would like to assist my students in marking up a biblical text for (say) genre-markers (like <statementOfTrust>text</statementOfTrust>), and then be able to manipulate the results for display (e.g., filtering several files for a particular marker and displaying the results in columns).

I once attended a THATCamp workshop session introducing TEI/XML, and that’s what led me to this question/topic. My familiarity with markup is limited to HTML/CSS and (Multi)Markdown. I know as much coding and RegEx as anyone gets from taking the same Javascript, Ruby, & RegEx online tutorials over and over again every year…so not much. I have never built an app. (And hope that my Category choices are mostly in the right ballpark.)

I’d like to propose a second instance of a session I led recently at THATCamp Virginia, which I’m calling a “Listen to Wikipedia guided meditation.” What we did there, and what I’d like to do again (though there are probably many much more worthy sessions!) was to spend some time listening to and watching the site at listen.hatnote.com (pictured above), spend some more time interacting with the site, spend some time writing about it, then spend a few minutes talking about it. Happy to facilitate it again if folks are interested.