TEI 2017 Victoria, British Columbia, Canada November 11 - 15

XML Mon Nov 13, 13:30–15:00

Tooling Up: Teaching TEI as an advanced Humanities research method (paper)

Alison Chapman* Dr. Alison Chapman is Professor of English at UVic, where she specializes in nineteenth-century literature and digital studies. She has published on digital pedagogies, such as in Teaching Transatlanticism: Resources for Teaching Nineteenth- Century Anglo-American Print Culture (2015), and she is the Editor of the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry (http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/).

1In this challenging era for graduate studies, after the collapse of the Humanities academic job market and before any widespread reform of graduate education, providing accredited skills is vital for life beyond the tenure track. One of those skills is student competency with TEI, which lends itself particularly well to the acknowledgement of student labour. This paper considers best practices for including TEI in the classroom, and specifically in Humanities research methods courses that are common and often mandatory aspects of MA and PhD programs, and that include coding as part of a diverse variety of skills necessary for advanced humanities research training.
2I will begin by reflecting on my experience of introducing TEI into a Research Methods and Textual Scholarship course in the Fall of 2016. The guest instructor for two seminars, Martin Holmes (HCMC), taught TEI with poems from the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry (http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/), a Database that Martin developed and maintains and that I edit. Those TEI seminars were overwhelmingly successful, but they also made me reflect on the ways in which a research methods course offers a variety of academic tools without necessarily connecting them up. While a final Omeka project based in Special Collections holdings was designed to provide a cumulative assignment to integrate the various research methods, TEI was not a part of that platform (for the Omeka project, see http://omeka.library.uvic.ca/exhibits/show/movable-type). The paper ends by considering options for integrating TEI more thoroughly into research methods and textual scholarship graduate classes. The conference occurs towards the end of my next research methods course, I will also report on what’s working in my revised syllabus.