A great deal of work in the digital humanities depends on the effective use of markup languages. Scholars in the humanities have readily mastered the techniques required to annotate texts in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). However, the full scholarly potential of machine-readable XML documents eludes many digital humanists. They are able to encode in XML, but lack the skills required to query their texts computationally. This leaves many feeling “stuck”—with texts all dressed up in markup but nowhere to go.
The XQuery Summer Institute at Vanderbilt University is aimed at archivists, librarians, professors, and students who have experience marking up texts in XML, but do not yet know how to work computationally with those documents. Our Institute aspires to recruit twelve members of the digital humanities community and help them to get “unstuck” and working productively with their XML-encoded texts.
The Institute took place from Monday, June 9 to Friday, June 20 on the campus of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.