Digital Humanities is an emerging research area that combines the expansiveness of computing with traditional humanities methods. Text encoding technologies offer new ways of analyzing texts. Whether it’s a medieval manuscript or graphic novel, when rendered machine-readable and encoded in extensible markup language, the large quantities of data generated in the process provides researchers with a vast overview that can inspire collaboration across disciplines and languages in innovative ways.
In March 2024, a group of UBC PhD students from across the Faculty of Arts came together to work through a common challenge in the field of digital text encoding: the lack of a diverse and inclusive framework in TEI-XML.
What is The Adaptive TEI Network Initiative about?
Under the project title “The Adaptive Text Encoding Initiative Network: Antiracist, Decolonial, and Inclusive Markup Interventions,” the students will collaborate with faculty and community members to co-author a new TEI schema, set within the TEI guidelines, that takes a social justice approach to encoding texts. Any new metadata elements proposed by the team will be submitted for approval to the TEI Council. Once accepted, these elements will become part of the TEI standard, meaning every project in the world that uses TEI-XML will have access to this more inclusive schema in their own markup practices and interventions.
For Sydney Lines, Project Co-Primary Investigator and PhD candidate in the Department of English Language & Literatures, the Adaptive TEI Network Initiative represents an opportunity to reimagine the future of digital humanities.
“Though TEI is still largely rooted in its Anglocentric, western origins, this is slowly starting to change. Our initiative, the Adaptive TEI Network, purposefully hosts projects with historical texts by and about racialized peoples and non-Anglo cultures and languages.”
Beyond uniting UBC scholars actively working on TEI-XML-based projects, the Adaptive TEI Network can also help to generate research questions, such as how scholars can adapt current TEI modules to allow for antiracist, decolonial, and inclusive markup practices. “For us, an antiracist/decolonial engagement with literary text includes things like how to appropriately attend to the use of racialized language (historical, outdated, and slurs) in a text,” Lines continues. “It also includes establishing a markup practice for indicating when a racialized or colonized person uses a term for themselves in a historical context in a way that does not perpetuate harm in the present.”
What does it mean to decolonize digital humanities?
Dr. Mary Chapman, one of the project’s faculty collaborators as well as Director of the Winnifred Eaton Archive and many other digital humanities projects, reminds us that textual analysis and scholarly editing have been at the heart of Humanities scholarship for centuries. “Digital humanities has given us tools to do both of these differently. The beauty of the CoLab project is that students will have support for digital aspects of their research and will collaborate on developing best practices for digital research which they can document in their dissertations.”
Lines further points out that the integration of technology and the humanities is nothing new – various cultures have used data visualization techniques over millennia through weaving, sculpture, and other media. She cites Mesopotamian clay tokens and South American quipus as examples. “The book is a technology. So is the printing press. When I write marginal notes in a physical book, highlight or underline phrases, add sticky notes, etc. I am engaging in analog markup practices,” she reflects. “The advent of the computer and thus the ‘digital’ world has brought new technological modes, but this does not necessarily negate opportunities for fundamentally humanistic production.”
“Digital humanities offers a chance to consider what it means to be human in relation to exponential technological advancements...By mixing methods from both computer science and the humanities, we can ask creative questions about technological ethics, limitations, externalities, and possibilities.”
For Daniel Orizaga Doguim, who is a PhD Candidate in the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, supplementing studies in the humanities with technology means creating more room for collaboration. “The study of Literature is often seen as a solitary effort: it is about facing a text in a personal, almost intimate way. In contrast, this project shows us that there are different models of collaborative work. By working together, we can propose perspectives and experiences that question some fossilized practices, while learning from other disciplines.”
“My research examines how gender-based violence is conceptualized and critiqued by contemporary Latin American female writers,” says Sarah Revilla-Sanchez, PhD Candidate in the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies. “Some of my research questions around the importance of recognizing, naming, and addressing violence and other forms of oppression are just as relevant when thinking about technological tools, which are designed by humans. As a humanities scholar, I aim to bring an intersectional and feminist lens to my engagement with TEI.”
“The Adaptive Text Encoding Initiative Network: Antiracist, Decolonial, and Inclusive Markup Interventions” is one of five awardees of the PhD CoLab Pilot Program offered by UBC Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, and the only winning project from the Faculty of Arts.
Meet the project team
The project team is made up of PhD students Sydney Lines (EL&L), Braden Russell (CENES), Sarah Revilla-Sanchez (FHIS), and Daniel Orizaga Doguim (FHIS). The students will work with faculty members Mary Chapman (EL&L), Katherine Bowers (CENES), Ramón “Arturo” Antonio Victoriano-Martinez (FHIS), Elizabeth Lagresa-González (FHIS), Ekatarina “Eka” Grgurić (UBC Digital Scholarship in the Arts, Research Commons, Walter C. Koerner Library) and Christine D’Onofrio (AHVA, UBC Digital Scholarship in the Arts); and sector partners Joey Takeda and Rebecca Dowson from the Simon Fraser University Digital Humanities Innovation Lab.
Learn about the Adaptive TEI Network projects
Co-led by Katherine Bowers, this corpus of encoded Russian-language texts enhances understanding of the structure, form, and narrative patterns of Dostoevsky’s texts through computational text analysis methods.
Learn more about Digital Dostoevsky
Directed by Mary Chapman, The Winnifred Eaton Archive is a peer-reviewed, open-access, fully searchable, TEI-encoded, digital scholarly edition of the collected works of the first Asian North American novelist.
Learn more about The Winnifred Eaton Archive
Directed by PhD Candidate Sydney Lines, The Laura Goodman Salverson Archive will collect and digitize the extant oeuvre of Icelandic-Canadian author Laura Goodman Salverson (1890-1970) and ask questions about her ethno-national identity-making as an Icelandic immigrant settler in North America.
The Periodico Union Civica Archive is directed by Ramón (Arturo) Antonio Victoriano-Martinez. It will digitize the Spanish-language newspaper published by Unión Cívica, a political movement and later party. The newspaper revealed the crimes of the dictatorship of Rafael L. Trujillo Molina (1930-1961), advocated for freedom and became the main platform for the UCN in the first democratic elections in the Dominican Republic.
The Novela Corta Project, directed by Elizabeth Lagresa-González, will enhance and create a virtual research hub where digitized versions of 17th-century “novellas” written by women can be analyzed in a comparative manner, as well as situated within the larger scope of late-stage Spanish-language novella creation in Spain.
Guest piece by Brooke Xiang (he/they), Communications Specialist for the Department of English Language & Literatures and the Department of History
