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Can’t help but offer this – a session in which to discuss the hows and whys of text encoding using XML and TEI. The discussion can also encompass databases used for digital text.

This is primarily a practical discussion, to share how participants engage with text encoding, their methods and tools. However, it is important to keep it in the context of text encoding as a conscious scholarly and research practice.

The discussion can range over what text encoding is about, how it helps, what to keep an eye out for, best practices for using it in a class, for research and publication. When is it easier or more appropriate to encode metadata rather than  “data?” What about other schemas? (Yes, I know the plural is schemata, but in XML, the plurals is schemas.)

This session could be a discussion among experienced users, or an introduction for novices. There are plenty of experts attending THATCamp who could lead it.

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DH activity, especially when it is based on creation or manipulation of digital materials, usually takes the form of a project – whether it is a dissertation, a grant, or a digital publication. Until recently, projects tended to be large and expensive, and to seek justification in words like “long term,” “sustainable,” “generalizable,” “infrastructure.” Such projects are intended for public use, and want to be many things to many people. In some cases, the shaping and presentation of the digital resources seem to have displaced the research questions that provided the initial impetus. The Index Thomisticus, which arguably started us all down this path, may even be the first example of this. These are the ocean liners – beautifully detailed, massive, able to cross the ocean – but they require a crew to sail and maintain them.

There are other DH projects, however, which have a more ephemeral quality; they may be more private in scope, less generalizable, and rough around the edges. These are originate as experiments and explorations, and are focussed on a research question, either firmly within a traditional discipline or at the intersection of a discipline and the use of technology. Examples may be the many data sets and visualizations we find in ManyEyes, or an individual research database. These are the dinghies – small, light and easy to sail, but not designed for long voyages.

The two types of project I have described above are not as distinct as I make out. What starts out as a dinghy of a research projects morphs into a ocean liner along the way, as the researchers needs and ambitions grow, or as their colleagues start to express interest. Large ocean liner projects become more useful if they can also behave like dinghies, allowing individuals to manouevre them where they need.

I’d like to discuss how projects take shape, how think about size, audience, and life-cycle. Should they all be engineered like ocean liners? How much detail and classificatory “purity” do digital materials need? When does it matter? Does it matter? Am I perhaps expressing a problem that pits researchers against librarians? What are the commonalities across types of project?