TEI 2026: LEAF Commons Tool Suite

This half-day workshop introduces textual scholars and practitioners to the LEAF Commons tool suite (https://www.leaf-vre.org/docs/about-leaf/leaf-commons), a set of web-based, modular, easy-to-use tools supporting text encoding, named entity recognition, web annotation, text analysis and publication without users having to learn markup/coding languages, and support easy movement between interoperable tools. This freely available suite of tools supports digital scholarly workflows for the collaborative production and publication of scholarly and documentary editions, and collections on the web, without the need for software installation. The LEAF Commons suite enables the use of individual tools for specific purposes, or supports an end-to-end workflow from transcription to publication allowing it to serve a wide range of research and pedagogical uses. This workshop will introduce the tools, features and functionality, integrate training materials in multiple languages, and encourage participants to think critically about how the LEAF Commons tools might help TEI2026 participants make good choices about their own workflows.

LEAF stands for the Linked Editing Academic Framework, a collaborative software suite that provides a set of modular tools for text editing and publication.(https://www.leaf-vre.org/) The LEAF Commons tools constitute an accessible, low-barrier, no-cost infrastructure for researchers to produce online texts, editions, or collections, whether for teaching or for undertaking research and collaboration on a sustainable basis. The LEAF Commons tools are freely available in the browser, enabling collaboration and publication through Github, in addition to permitting local storage or installation in a local stack. The LEAF Commons tools promote reuse of data methodologies in keeping with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles, LEAF uses open-source software, open-access platforms, and open international standards for best practices in text-encoding (TEI-XML – https://tei-c.org) and web annotation (RDF – https://www.w3.org/RDF/).

LEAF promotes best practices, reuse, and sustainability in the production of digital scholarship in the humanities through tools designed to bridge the gap between scholars with (en)coding experience, and those who do not. LEAF Commons offers communities of researchers, teachers, and students the opportunity to take part in digital knowledge production and open collaboration. The workshop will end with open discussion about pursuing such forms of open knowledge production and collaboration.

LEAF-Writer: (https://leaf-writer.leaf-vre.org/) an open-source, open-access multi-lingual Extensible Markup Language (XML) editor that runs in a web browser and offers scholars and their students a rich textual editing experience without the need to download, install, and configure proprietary software, pay ongoing subscription fees, or learn complex coding languages. This user-friendly editing environment incorporates Text Encoding Initiatives (TEI) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) standards. It incorporates reconciliation with linked open data identifiers and project-specific authorities as part of the encoding process. LEAF-Writer is particularly valuable in pedagogical contexts, enabling instructors to teach students good encoding practices without also needing to teach students coding or installing software locally.

LEAF-TE: (The LEAF Turning Engine – https://www.leaf-vre.org/docs/features/leaf-te) is a headless API that enables users to easily and automatically transform documents between formats. It converts HTR/OCR output and MS Word to TEI-XML for importing into LEAF-Writer. It also exports from LEAF-Writer to HTML, Markdown, RDF, CSV, and plain text for exporting encoded texts for publishing, analysis, and preparing for linking textual data.

NERVE: (the Named Entity Relationship and Vetting Environment – https://nerve.lincsproject.ca/) is an application that performs Named Entity Recognition (NER) on machine-readable texts, allowing users to identify candidate entities in a document, review, and correct the results, to produce both TEI markup and/or Linked Open Data (LOD) Web Annotations. Users can export their reconciled data in TEI-XML or JSON formats to an online repository or to their desktop. NERVE can be used in conjunction with LEAF-Writer, or as a stand-alone tool.

DToC: (the Dynamic Table of Contexts – https://www.leaf-vre.org/docs/features/dtoc) provides an online interactive reading and publication environment for digital scholarly texts where the two conventional overviews provided in print editions – the table of contents and the index – have been dynamically merged to provide an interactive online e-reading experience that leverages the power of XML markup. Users can build a DToC edition from one or more TEI-XML files, then curate and label the underlying elements and attributes in order to understand where named entities, topics, and concepts can be traced within the edition. Editions can be stored using URLs and shared with readers as published or teaching texts.

Requirements and Availabilities:

• Participants will need a web-enabled laptop computer (not a tablet or a mobile device).
• No software installation is required.
• Sample texts in multiple languages will be provided, which participants will continue to have access to after the workshop; participants can also test their own documents in TEI-conformant XML.

Presenters: J. Cummings, S. Brown, D. Jakacki, M. Ilovan, L. Frizzera