Presentation at the TEI Conference and Members' Meeting 2015, October 28-31, Lyon, France

1. Florentina Armaselu – DHLab, Centre virtuel de la connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE),
Luxembourg
florentina.armaselu@cvce.eu
1
www.cvce.eu
From a Small-Scale Digital Edition to a TEI
Publication Framework in Modern
European History
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Conference and Members’
Meeting. Connect, Animate, Innovate. 28 to 31 Octobre
2015. Université Lumière Lyon 2

2. 1. The WEU-DIPLO pilot project
2. Transviewer, towards a TEI publication
framework
3. Discussion
4. References
Summary
2

3. Part I
The WEU-DIPLO pilot project
3

4. 1. Goal: XML-TEI encoding, corpus analysis and Web publication of institutional documents
of the W.E.U. (Western European Union):
• Topics: armament production, standardization, control in the period from 1954 to 1982;
• Source: Archives nationales de Luxembourg, W.E.U collection.
2. Initial format:
• digitized versions (JPG) of typewritten materials (one file per page).
3. Size:
*proc. = processed
Overview of the WEU-DIPLO project
Part I. WEU-DIPLO pilot 4
Category Number of
documents
Number of documents
per language
Number
of pages
Number of pages per
language
EN FR FR proc.* EN FR FR proc.*
Note 89 43 46 37 395 191 204 155
Minutes 30 15 15 15 256 138 118 118
Memorandum 3 1 2 2 16 7 9 9
Study 2 0 2 1 12 0 12 8
Discourse 1 0 1 0 4 0 4 0
Draft protocol 2 1 1 0 4 2 2 0
Total 127 60 67 55 687 338 349 290

5. Overview of the WEU-DIPLO project: workflow
Part I. WEU-DIPLO pilot 5

6. Overview of the WEU-DIPLO project: page structure. ©WEU-UEO
Part I. WEU-DIPLO pilot 6
Header
Content
Footer

7. Microsoft Word Styling – WEU-DIPLO
Part I. WEU-DIPLO pilot 7
Headers, footers
Headings, line breaks,
paragraphs

8. Conversion and enrichment (XSLT, manual, NER)
Part I. WEU-DIPLO pilot 8
OxGarage (DOCX to TEI P5)
oXygen XML Editor
• XSLT transformation (metadata, structure);
• manual enrichment (semantics – discourse
of country/institutional representatives)
GATE (Name Entity Recognition)
• training phase (Gazetteer List Collector)
• annotation phase (names of persons,
organisations, places, functions, events,
products; dates)
oXygen XML Editor
• XSLT (GATE XML to TEI P5 transformation)

9. XML-TEI Encoding: WEU-DIPLO - metadata; layout (header). ©WEU-UEO
Part I. WEU-DIPLO pilot 9
@@hAuthor
@@hArchNum
@@hStampConfid
@@hDocRef
@@hOrigDate
@@hOrigLang
@@hVersion

10. XML-TEI Encoding: WEU-DIPLO – Structure (headings, paragraphs, line breaks); semantics (named
entities, discourse). ©WEU-UEO
Part I. WEU-DIPLO pilot 10
@@Heading2@@Paragraph
@@LineBreak@@Names
@@Discourse

11. XML-TEI Encoding: WEU-DIPLO – transcription features (Pierazzo, 2011)
Part I. WEU-DIPLO pilot 11

12. Part II
Transviewer, towards a TEI
publication framework
12

13. • Treaties; official declarations and meeting reports; letters; notes; press articles; images, video and
audio archives related to European integration history
Context: The CVCE’s ePublications
Part II. Transviewer 13

14. 1. Transviewer concept:
• XML-TEI transformation/visualisation on the fly, in the browser
• flexible framework for the publication of XML-TEI documents in European
integration history;
2. Technologies :
• XML, HTML, XSLT, CSS and JavaScript
3. Tested platforms:
• EVT (Edition Visualization Technology): http://sourceforge.net/projects/evt-project/
• KILN : http://kiln.readthedocs.org/en/latest/#
• TEIBoilerplate : http://dcl.ils.indiana.edu/teibp/
• Versioning Machine: http://v-machine.org/
• XTF (eXtensible Text Framework): http://xtf.cdlib.org/about/
Transviewer overview
Part II. Transviewer 14

15. Implementation (adaptation and in-house development):
• side-by-side view digital facsimile and transcription (EVT model)
• third-party libraries:
o BookReader: tool designed to provide online access to scanned books
o Saxon-CE: support for XSLT 2.0 transformation in the browser
o in-house development (configuration, frames and buttons layout/actions, transcription rendering, third-party libraries
calls)
Transviewer prototype
Part II. Transviewer 15

16. Transviewer experiments– digital facsimile/transcription side-by-side view. ©WEU-UEO
Part II. Transviewer 16

17. Transviewer experiments– digital facsimile/transcription side-by-side view. Werner –
handwritten notes
Part II. Transviewer 17

18. Transviewer experiments (simulation) – video/audio and transcription synchronisation.
Werner - interviews
Part II. Transviewer 18

19. Transviewer features – panels layouts
Part II. Transviewer 19

20. Transviewer features– transcription format
Part II. Transviewer 20

21. Transviewer features– panels interlinking
Part II. Transviewer 21

22. Part III
Discussion
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23. “By teaching an edition how to swim, I mean endowing an edition not only with a
store of factual knowledge concerning the work presented, but also with the
capability of dealing gracefully with the mutability of the electronic medium, by
exploiting the possibilities for reader-controlled changes to the edition’s
presentation and by adapting successfully to rapid changes in the hardware and
software environment.” (Sperberg-McQueen, 2009)
1. Transviewer prototype questions:
• flexible enough to support different types of documents in
European integration history and different user requirements;
• modular architecture to allow gradual development and
customisation according to the needs of the projects;
• balance manual interventions/automatic processing (XSLT, NER);
• XML transformation on the fly (no need for intermediary
formats/steps, changes to the XML already part of the publication).
Discussion
Part III. Discussion 23

24. 3. Issues:
• BookReader – use of an older version of jQuery library;
• non-uniform support of Saxon-CE for XSLT 2.0 transformation in the
browsers;
• need for batch conversion to XML-TEI (potential adaptation of
OxGarage for batch processing).
4. Ongoing/future work for further development:
• evaluation (technology – technical experts; usability tests – experts
in European integration studies);
• development of new modules (multi-panels, audio/video
transcription, etc.) and tests with more project samples;
• integration into the existing CVCE’s Website architecture:
o Back End;
o Front End.
Discussion
Part III. Discussion 24

25. Thank you!
Discussion
25
Scaling in a publication framework would imply not only
teaching your editions “how to swim” but also how to swim
together.

26. • Book Reader: https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader
• EVT (Edition Visualization Technology): http://sourceforge.net/projects/evt-project/
• GATE: https://gate.ac.uk/
• KILN : http://kiln.readthedocs.org/en/latest/#
• OxGarage: http://www.tei-c.org/oxgarage/
• Pierazzo, Elena. (2011). A rationale of digital documentary editions. In LLC. The Journal of Digital
Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 26, No. 4, December 2011, pp. 463-477.
• http://www.scholarlyediting.org/2014/essays/essay.pierazzo.html.
• TEIBoilerplate : http://dcl.ils.indiana.edu/teibp/
• TEI (Text Encoding Initiative): http://www.tei-c.org
• Versioning Machine: http://v-machine.org/
• Saxon-CE: http://www.saxonica.com/ce/user-doc/1.1/index.html
• Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. 2009. “How to teach your edition how to swim”. In LLC. The Journal of Digital
Scholarship in the Humanities. Volume 24, No. 1, April 2009. Oxford Journals.
• XTF (eXtensible Text Framework): http://xtf.cdlib.org/about/
References
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