Editing Modernism in Canada

Project Planning

Melissa Dalgleish has compiled a great list of things to think about when embarking on a digital project, originally posted in the EMiC blog:

What documents will I be working with?

• Where are they located?
• How many are there? (and therefore, how big the project is and how long it will take)
• Who holds control over access to them?
• How do I  get access and permission to publish digitally?
• What do I want this project to be/do?
• How do I make it be/do that digitally?
• How big is this going to be (#of documents)?
• How long is it going to take to create? What’s my timeline and schedule?
• What do I need to learn?
• What resources will I need?

• education: TEI, CSS, XMLT, IMT, analytics
• time: assessing, scanning, coding, web design, tweaking
• tech: oXygen, web editors, computer, hosting site, tech support, OCR program, scanner
• money: permissions, hosting, scanning, labour, education, software
• people: to teach, to work, to listen
• How can I access these resources?

• At my university: people, physical, and monetary resources
• Through EMiC
• At DHSI
• Through funding agencies and grants
• My own resources, research, and self-teaching

What do I do with these documents?

• scan them
• run them through OCR(Optical Character Recognition) software to prepare them for TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative) mark-up
• make photo-quality scans for use with the IMT (Image Mark-up Tool)

How do I make them digital?

• Perform TEI markup for conversion to web format and use with analytic tools (according to a standard schema and limited tag set for EMiC projects)
• Perform IMT markup for digital facsimiles
• Think about ways of integrating/paralleling the two

How do I make them usable?

• converting TEI to functional websites (CSS, XSLT etc.)
• to do this ourselves, or to hire someone?
• getting them online (hosting etc.)
• making them aesthetically pleasing: EMiC-standard web design
• searchability/ analytics/visualizations

How do I make them known?

• promoting our projects to the wider community: English scholars and students, digital humanists, general readers

How to manage EMiC projects alongside our “official” Master’s and doctoral work?

• time management
• working at institutions/with supervisors who are not EMiC affiliated