About this Textbook for creating Digital Editions
What this open access textbook includes
This freely available online textbook consists of four parts:
- A usable digital-edition publishing system, the DigEd System:
- Instructions for setting up files both on local computers and on web space so that they system works as it should;
- Instructions for rules to follow when encoding TEI pages of the digital edition (viewable online or downloadable so that the system will work as it should;
- Templates for creating TEI files of different types;
- A sample digital edition built using these methods;
- And finally, a finished Digital Edition available to view and download, containing the CSS and XSLT files to be used in creating your digital edition along with sample documents coded according to the DigEd System rules.
- Instructions on how to use the system;
- Explanations of how all the code comprising the system works so that users of the DigEd System can modify it, should they wish, or even learn to create their own system, using whatever bits of this one they find useful;
- Access to a slack channel for immediate help when things go wrong. (See Working with Code in the Introduction.)
How the textbook and DigEd System Work
It is difficult for humanists to find web-page building tutorials that are not created for learning to become a web designer or programmer. This textbook is addressed not to future web professionals but to non-experts who wish to create archival-quality digital editions that they wish to publish online. Much of these instructions are addressed to those who have no experience at all in creating web pages or coding. There is one very easy way to to use the DigEd System:
- Set up server space, set up your digital edition files, and learn how to transfer your digital edition to it in a way that everything works with no modification (instructions here);
- create TEI documents by starting with the the document samples and following the rules provided here;
- learn to run the XSLT programs in oXygen, and transform your XML files into the HTML that works with this system;
- Put it all online.
But the textbook also explains how and why the software works, with the following incremental learning objectives:
- the user ideally learns to read and understand how the appearance of the digital edition is being generated by the system: CSS and HTML)
- the user ideally learns to read and understand how TEI is transformed by the software or code into the published HTML-encoded web pages: XPath and XSLT.
- the user is able to modify the DigEd System for their own needs and preferences.