Interedition has the pleasure of inviting all interested scholars and developers to participate in the upcoming Bootcamp to be held on the occasion of the 2012 conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (http://ests2012.huygens.knaw.nl/). This bootcamp will be held from 21 until 24 November 2012 at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands in The Hague.
Challenge
Computational models of text in the digital humanities are strongly informed by the technological basis which practitioners in the field choose to process them. Such technological bases may be found in XML-based technologies employed for encoding, processing and delivering digital texts. They may be found in alternatives like the Resource Description Format (RDF), string-/range-based models or network/graph-oriented approaches. Which ever: each of these technological frameworks shape the way we construct and (in the end) conduct computations on digital texts. While the family of XML-related tools forms an ecosystem which does not only include an encoding standard but also offers a manifold of options for processing XML-encoded data (XPath, XQuery, XSLT, XProc etc.), alternatives often fall short of providing easy-to-use, practical solutions for the digital humanist when it comes to leveraging the advantages of such complementary approaches.
This particular bootcamp therefore sets a formidable challenge: can the contours of an alternative, domain specific language (DSL) for the flexible processing of texts (beyond the constraints of e.g. XML) be defined and the beginnings of a reference implementation be designed and constructed in mere days?
Interedition offers a limited number of bursaries to potential participants to support attending this bootcamp.
More information is in the full call for participation.