Course objectives An understanding of the purpose and utility of text encoding and markup for language corpora An overview of the TEI Guidelines and their recommendations for language corpora Practical experience in: using XML editing software to Create new encoded texts Standardize existing digital texts Using XML retrieval tools to Build a searchable corpus Analyse the corpus

The Programme Thursday Digital texts with XML and the TEI This talk begins by asking what a digital text is, and how it might best be encoded. The session includes a group exercise in which participants reviewed a page from Punch and also a mildly technical introduction to the concepts and syntax of XML and XML DTDs. In the first practical exercise, we used a simple XML editor (Xmetal) to tag the poem on our sample page and noted some drawbacks in its DTD TEI Overview This talk gives an overview of the TEI lite DTD and its contents In the second practical exercise, we used a different XML editor (tei-emacs) to encode our Punch texts using the TEI DTD. TEI Other Pizze This talk introduces some other ways of using the TEI scheme, in particular its suggestions for how to tag spoken texts and linguistic analyses Friday Metadata matters This talk discusses metadata, in particular how to use the TEI Header to provide contextual information for a TEI corpus In the third practical exercise, students first made a corpus header for their own material, and then tagged (at least) one text using TEI Lite. Making silk purses from sows ears This talk discusses some issues in converting from other formats into XML, and also included some live demonstrations: this revised and expanded version of the talk includes links to the materials demonstrated. In the fourth practical session, students constructed a searchable version of their own corpus, using the beta test version of Xara Index Tools. Dinner at Ristorante Elvezia, San Cristoforo Saturday From Sara to Xara This talk discusses the design and features of the Xara system In the final practical session, students continued exploring what could be done using Xara to search their own materials, and some other corpora. In the final review and discussion, students requested more documentation before hand, more time to explore the software, more coverage of tools for data laundry, more background on corpus design principles, and more guidance on formulating complex queries. Topics covered seemed appropriate; there were a few teething problems with software installation and compatibility.

The Participants Instructor Lou Burnard lou.burnard@oucs.ox.ac.uk Local arrangements Guy Aston guy@sslmit.unibo.it Students, researchers, and staff at SSLMIT Carla Agraria; Amalia Amato ; Marco Baroni ; Silvia Bernardini ; Gabriele Bersani Berselli ; Sara Castagnoli; Letizia Cirillo ; Sabrina Fusari ; Jane Johnson; Helena Lozano; Gabi Mack; Chiara Monzoni; Lorenzo Piccioni ; Sara Piccioni; Chiara Russo; Dominic Stewart; Eros Zanchetta Visiting Researchers Stefania Biscetti (Siena); Fabio Curzi (Macerata); Francesca Vaghi (Napoli); Marco Venuti (Napoli)

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