Processing Your XML/TEI with the XML Family of Languages (DHSI 2026)

Description

This class teaches you how to navigate and process XML using tools designed for the purpose–XSLT, XQuery, and Schematron. We cover these together as members of the same XML family, sharing a common syntax in XPath. New and experienced coders of XML will benefit alike from this course, whether just beginning a project or seeking to update and refresh skills. Our goals are 1) to share strategies for systematically building archives and databases, and 2) to increase participants’ confidence and fluency in extracting information coded in XML in those archives and databases. XPath is the center of the course, but we will show you how it applies in multiple XML processing contexts so that you learn how these work similarly and how these are used, respectively, to validate documents and to transform them for publication and other reuse. We’ll apply XPath to check for accuracy of text encoding–to write schema rules to manage your coding (or your project team’s coding).

You’ll practice and gain fluency in writing XPath expressions and patterns, including sequence expressions, regular expressions, datatypes, predicates, operators, and functions (from the core library and user-defined). We’ll write XPath to calculate how frequently you’ve marked a certain phenomenon, or locate which names of people are mentioned together in the same chapter, paragraph, sentence, stanza, or annotation. You’ll learn how XPath can help you to build exciting visualizations from XML code (such as to make a chart like a timeline or a network graph). Whether you are an XML beginner or a more experienced coder, you’ll find that strengthened skills in XPath and the XML family will help you with systematic encoding, document processing, and project management.

Prerequisites: Some experience with XML markup. No prior experience with programming is required.

Instructor(s)

Elisa Beshero-Bondar is Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology and Professor of Digital Humanities at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. She teaches undergraduate students to code and build digital projects with the XML family of languages. Elisa led the technical development of the Frankenstein Variorum project combining Python, XSLT, and TEI to compare 5 distinct digital versions of the novel Frankenstein. She  is also founder and director of the Digital Mitford Project which has hosted  coding  workshops for graduate students, faculty, scholarly editors, and librarians interested in learning coding and digital project management methods used in the project. She was elected to the TEI Technical Council in 2015, which she now chairs, and where she works with ten other members from around the world in revising the TEI Guidelines and schema and supporting the TEI community.

David J. Birnbaum is Professor Emeritus from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been involved in the study of electronic text technology since the mid-1980s, has delivered presentations at a variety of electronic text technology conferences, and has served on the board of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the editorial board of Markup languages: Theory and practice, and the Text Encoding Initiative Council. Much of his electronic text work intersects with his research in medieval Slavic manuscript studies, but he also often writes about issues in the philosophy of markup.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)