Content description

The UAntwerp DH Summer School 2025 edition is titled Computer-assisted genetic editing: from medieval manuscripts to born-digital documents. It offers an intensive 5-day entry level hands-on course on making digital editions of analogue and born-digital texts.

In this course, participants will acquire a set of basic computer skills such as xml mark-up language and handwritten text recognition to design a fully-fledged, TEI-compatible Digital Scholarly Edition and deploy keystroke logging technology to record and analyse born-digital texts.

The target audience includes undergraduate students (BA3), graduate (MA) and postgraduate (PhD, postdoc) students as well as professionals in the field of Humanities.  MA students can earn 6 ECTS credits upon successful completion of the programme and submission of an extra assignment. 

09:30-11:00: Session 1
11:00-11:30: Coffee break A
11:30-12:30: Session 2
12:30-13:30: Lunch
13:30-15:30: Session 3
15:30-16:00: Coffee break B
16:00-17:00: Session 4 / Keynote slot

preliminary programme

MONDAY | Digital Scholarly Editing and Medieval Manuscripts

Digital Scholarly Editing, Theory and Practice, XML

We will start the week with the theoretical background of digital scholarly editing. After this introduction to digital scholarly editing, we will specifically focus on digital editing projects of Medieval manuscripts. After lunch, we will focus on the basics of XML and practice with transcribing Medieval manuscripts.

TUESDAY | Keystroke Logging and Born-Digital Manuscripts

GGXLog, keystroke logging, TEI-XML, Keystroke Procera, Keystroke Loxensis

On the second day, we will explore how we can create digital editions of born-digital manuscripts, specifically through the use of keystroke logging. As an exercise, we will write a poem on the computer and log the writing process using a keystroke logger (GGXLog). We will then use these keystroke logging files to learn the basic technologies involved in making a (genetic) digital edition. As a first step, we will produce a TEI-XML base layer with Keystroke Procera, consisting of all writing operations (e.g. additions, deletions) in TEI-XML together with the timestamp. We will then correct this base layer and enrich the encoding with additional information. These XML files will be used to visualise the reconstructions of the digital writing processes with Keystroke Loxensis. .

WEDNESDAY | Handwritten Text Recognition and Modern Manuscripts

Transkribus, eScriptorium, Axolotl

On the third day, we will dive into the world of handwritten text recognition (HTR) by looking into the workflows in Transkribus and eScriptorium. After a short introduction to HTR, we will use Transkribus to transcribe a couple of pages of Arthur Conan Doyle’s manuscript of one of the Sherlock Holmes stories: “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder”. However, the resulting transcription is not outputted in an ideal format for digital scholarly editions, making post-processing and validation a necessary next step. For the post-processing tasks of HTR results, we will work with the Collaborative XML Editor Axolotl. After importing HTR output from platforms such as eScriptorium and Transkribus, Axolotl allows for post-processing, including correcting and validating transcriptions, linking additions and metamarks, adding additional markup, and modifying annotations and zones.

THURSDAY | Towards a Digital Edition Light

GitHub, HTML, CSS, XPath, XSLT

On the fourth day we will learn the basic steps needed to create a digital edition (light). We will start the day with a brief introduction to GitHub. We will then discuss the Digital Edition Template that we will use to make our own digital edition with GitHub Pages. By using this template, we will be able to gain knowledge of the technologies needed to create a digital edition: HTML, CSS, XPath and XSLT – which will be individually discussed as well. We will conclude the day with a keynote presentation given by Wout Dillen.

FRIDAY | Visualising Manuscripts and Born-Digital Writing Processes

GitHub, TEI-XML, XPath, XSLT, HTML, CSS

On the last day, we will use the skills acquired in the previous days to create a light digital edition hosted on GitHub. We will use a template (provided by the teachers) for a mini-Sherlock Holmes digital edition and modify and personalise it accordingly. This will give us plenty of time to practise HTML, CSS, XPath and XSLT. This mini digital edition can then be published online on GitHub and Zenodo. We will conclude the summer school with a final discussion and an overview of other useful tools and software.

AFTER THE SUMMER SCHOOL

Upon successful completion of the summer school course (including the preparatory assignment), students will be credited 3 ECTS — the certificates of which they can present to their home institutions. Students who wish to earn 6 ECTS instead, will receive an additional assignment that will be completed individually over the summer. In this assignment, students will be asked to apply what they learned to their own materials, and develop their own small-scale demo edition.

To include the credits in the curriculum at the home institution, participants need an agreement with the responsible person at the home institution.

A certificate will be awarded at the end of the programme.

• Lamyk Bekius
• Wouter Haverals​
• ​Sofie Moors​
• Nooshin Shahidzadeh Asadi
• ​Caroline Vandyck​

Good Enough for Government Work?

In its traditional print format, the Scholarly Edition has long held a stable place in research libraries, where it could remain in the archives for as long as there was scholarly interest in the material. However, hosting Digital Scholarly Editions within the complex technical infrastructure of libraries is a far less straightforward process. And while librarians have consistently been at the forefront of the digital revolution, updating institutional infrastructure is a slow and expensive process that requires careful negotiations among various parties with conflicting interests. These tensions often influence libraries to develop services that provide ‘satisfactory’ results to the largest number of patrons (at the cost of granular detail, if necessary), and to leverage artificial intelligence for tasks like transcribing and describing their digitised collections. 

From the outside, such generic approaches may seem at odds with the specific, often evolving needs of Digital Scholarly Editions, which are shaped by a fast-changing technological landscape. This can make it difficult for libraries to commit to hosting and maintaining such unique digital objects in the long term. At the same time, libraries – and especially those that are publicly funded – organize their work according to strict adherence to standards, including those related to (web) accessibility, which are only recently considered by the scholarly editing community. By examining Digital Scholarly Editions through the lens of library practice, this presentation will explore the connections between the rigorous standards of both the scholarly editing and library communities, so we may work toward our mutually-beneficial goal of preserving these culturally significant digital artifacts.

Wout Dillen is a Senior Lecturer in Library and Information Science at the University of Borås, Sweden, with a focus on Knowledge Organization and Digital Environments. In 2015, he completed his Ph.D in Literature at the University of Antwerp, where his dissertation focussed on Digital Scholarly Editing in the field of Genetic Criticism. As part of this project, he also developed the Lexicon for Scholarly Editing, an Open Access, lexicographical resource in the field. In 2016, he held an Experienced Researcher fellowship in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN on Digital Scholarly Editing called DiXiT, where his reserearch investigated critical digitization processes at National Libraries across Europe. Wout has also acted as the Secretary of the European Society for Textual Scholarship from 2017 to 2024, and currently serves as an ex officio board member as the general editor of the society’s journal Variants. Alongside Variants, Wout is also on the editorial board of the Journal of the DH Benelux, and acts as deputy editor for the LIS journal Information Research.

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