Vanderbilt University, Advancing XML-Based Scholarship
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Narrative Section of a Successful Application The attached document contains the grant narrative and selected portions of a previously funded grant application. It is not intended to serve as a model, but to give you a sense of how a successful application may be crafted. Every successful application is different, and each applicant is urged to prepare a proposal that reflects its unique project and aspirations. Prospective applicants should consult the Office of Digital Humanities application guidelines at http://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/institutes-advanced-topics-in-the-digital- humanities for instructions. Applicants are also strongly encouraged to consult with the NEH Office of Digital Humanities staff well before a grant deadline. Note: The attachment only contains the grant narrative and selected portions, not the entire funded application. In addition, certain portions may have been redacted to protect the privacy interests of an individual and/or to protect confidential commercial and financial information and/or to protect copyrighted materials. Project Title: XQuery Summer Institute: Advancing XML-Based Scholarship from Representation to Discovery Institution: Vanderbilt University Project Directors: Clifford Anderson Grant Program: Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities 1100 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Rm. 402, Washington, D.C. 20506 P 202.606.8401 F 202.606.8411 E [email protected] www.neh.gov Summary A great deal of work in the digital humanities depends on the effective use of markup languages. Scholars in the humanities have readily mastered the techniques required to annotate texts in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). However, the full scholarly potential of machine-readable XML documents eludes many digital humanists. They are able to encode in XML, but lack the skills required to query their texts computationally. This leaves many feeling “stuck”—with texts all dressed up in markup but nowhere to go. The XQuery Summer Institute at Vanderbilt University will be aimed at archivists, librarians, professors, and students who have experience marking up texts in XML, but do not yet know how to work computationally with those documents. Our institute aspires to recruit twelve members of the digital humanities community and help them to get “unstuck” and working productively with their XML-encoded texts. The interdisciplinary team of leaders number among the best qualified in their fields. Clifford Anderson and two other members of the Vanderbilt University community will conduct the instruction in consultation with Jonathan Robie, Lead Editor of the XQuery and XPath Recommendations at the WC3, and other expert consultants. The leaders will offer the training in XQuery required for intermediate digital humanists to move to an advanced level of XML expertise. The institute will teach digital humanists how to ask questions across a corpus of digital texts using XQuery. XQuery provides an easy way for humanists to pick up programming because it does not require a lot of “boiler plate” code up front. Powerful queries can be written in one or two lines of code. Using an open source XML database called eXist, participants will learn how to ingest their digital texts into a database and write simple XQuery programs to analyze them. The institute will purposely keep the programming toolset simple while maximizing its expressive power. Participants will go beyond using XML for representation to querying XML for discovery. The institute will take place on the campus of Vanderbilt University from June 9 to June 20, 2014. Vanderbilt University is a top private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee. The institute will be hosted by the University Library, which has a long track record of research and development of emerging technologies. Participants will leave with sufficient proficiency in XQuery to work computationally with their XML documents, querying them for specific items of information, searching them for new discoveries, combining them with other data sources, and rendering them publicly through interactive websites. We also anticipate indirect effects from the institute, including publicity for XQuery and the development of a more cohesive community of XQuery users in the digital humanities. GRANT11347363 -- Attachments-ATT1-1234-summary.pdf Table of Contents Significance................................................................................................................................................... 1 Institutional Profile ................................................................................................................................... 3 Curriculum and Work Plan .................................................................................................................... 4 Selection of Participants .......................................................................................................................... 7 Impact and Evaluation ............................................................................................................................. 7 Staff and Consultants ................................................................................................................................ 9 Budget Notes................................................................................................................................................ 10 Budget (and Vanderbilt University’s Indirect Cost Rate Agreement) Appendix A: Detailed Curriculum Appendix B: Brief Staff Resumes Appendix C: Letters of Commitment Appendix D: Institutional Affiliations GRANT11347363 -- Attachments-ATT2-1235-contents.pdf XQuery Summer Institute: Advancing XML-Based Scholarship from Representation to Discovery Significance Introduction One of the milestones in digital humanities scholarship has been the adoption of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as a basic standard for representing information in digital form. Courtesy of a variety of gentle introductory tools, a beginning scholar can quickly learn to encode text following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) or the metadata schemas of the library community (EAD, MODS, MADS, METS, etc.). The story of XML literacy in the digital humanities is a success story, but only a partial one. The full scholarly potential of machine-readable XML documents eludes many digital humanists. They are able to encode in XML but lack tools to program the machine reading of their own documents. A significant number of scholars in the humanities have learned the rudiments of TEI, for example, but very few have experience with XQuery or XML databases. This leaves many feeling “stuck”—with texts all dressed up in markup but nowhere to go. The XQuery Summer Institute at Vanderbilt University will be aimed at archivists, librarians, professors, and students who have some experience marking up texts in XML, but do not yet know how to work computationally with those documents. Our institute aspires to recruit twelve members of the digital humanities community and help them to get unstuck and working productively with their XML-encoded texts. The leaders of the institute will offer the training needed for intermediate digital humanists to move to an advanced level of XML expertise. Participants will go beyond using XML for representation to querying XML for discovery. Why XQuery? Learning how to mark up digital texts and learning how to program are significantly different intellectual undertakings. Scholars may learn how to encode scholarly texts using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines but further skills are needed to investigate them computationally, specifically training in XQuery (http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/). XQuery is a simple yet powerful language developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org/) for querying and extracting information from multiple XML documents. XQuery has become the principal query language for a new breed of XML databases. With XQuery, scholars can learn a single language to ingest their texts into an XML database, ask questions of them, connect them with other sources of information, and publish them on the web. In short, XQuery is the discovery tool for XML. 1 GRANT11347363 -- Attachments-ATT3-1236-narrative.pdf XQuery is already in use in digital humanities scholarship including: The Theological Commons (http://commons.ptsem.edu), the largest open access library in the field of religious studies and theology, is built entirely in XQuery. The Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and the Cologne Center for eHumanities have jointly developed a digital edition in XQuery of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (http://totenbuch.awk.nrw.de//). Rotunda, a digital imprint of the University of Virginia Press, has produced commercial editions using XQuery, including Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences (http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/edc/) and the Dolley Madison Digital Edition (http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/dmde/). These projects illustrate the flexibility and scalability of XQuery as a programming language for the digital humanities. Training in XQuery alleviates two challenges scholars frequently encounter when seeking to perform computational analyses of XML datasets. Many scholars rely on the programming language Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) for analysis of marked up texts. While XSLT excels at many uses, it is not optimized for querying across large XML datasets. XQuery provides a robust discovery-oriented alternative