Antwerp Digital Humanities Summer School

Introduction

Prior to this week, I had only a vague familiarity with concepts like XML, TEI, and GitHub as well as tools such as Transkribus and eScriptorium. I’d never even heard of programs like Oxygen XML Editor and Visual Studio Code which are quite common in the Computer Science world for coding and text editing. During this past week, however, my time at the University of Antwerp’s Digital Humanities Summer School has provided me a solid foundation from which to expand my competencies in these concepts and tools which in turn will broaden my methodological toolkit, enhance my research capabilities, and allow me to work on exciting projects in the digital humanities. Here’s a brief recap of my summer school experience.

Overview

Hosted by the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Digital Humanities and Literary Criticism (ACDC), this year’s 5-day intensive Digital Humanities Summer School (July 1-5, 2024) was about computer-assisted genetic edition from medieval manuscripts to born-digital documents (see here). The program (see here) was well-crafted to cover topics in the digital scholarly editing of medieval manuscripts, handwritten text recognition (HTR) including modern manuscripts, keystroke logging, and so forth. The emphasis was acquiring a basic familiarity with the skills and software tools necessary to undertake such research.

Lecturers & Sessions

The main lecturers for the summer school were Lamyk Bekius (Antwerp), Wouter Haverals (Princeton), Nooshin Shahidzadeh Asadi (Antwerp), Sofie Moors (Antwerp), and Caroline Vandyck (Antwerp), with an additional lecture by Dirk Van Hulle (Oxford and Antwerp) as well as the keynote by Wouter Haverals. The summer school was directed by Olga Beloborodova (Antwerp). After the initial lecture by Van Hulle introducing the field of digital scholarly editing, the first day focused on coding in Extensible Markup Language (XML), specifically the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), especially in the framework of using it for editing medieval texts. On Tuesday, Wouter introduced the group to Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) using Transkribus and eScriptorium with two sessions devoted to practicing our new HTR skills by transcribing and editing a leaf of Arthur Conan Doyle’s handwritten copy of The Adventure of the Norwood Builder in Transkribus. Wednesday was dedicated to Keystroke Logging and associated tools, and Thursday was about getting started with Git and GitHub. Thursday ended with Wouter’s keynote lecture titled “UnEditions: Sha(r)p(en)ing the Future of Digital Scholarly Editions,” which was a fascinatingly provocative talk about the future of the field of Digital Scholarly Editing (spoiler: multimodal models are the future of DSE). Friday’s session brought everything together through a hands-on session called “Making a Digital Edition Light” (by which I assume the meant a digital edition lite); we spent the day cleaning up and “publishing” our Doyle leaf (including the image and text) on GitHub (I’ve since deleted mine given its poor quality but will certainly publish other stuff on GitHub in the future). I’m particularly thankful that each of the presenters made available their slide deck which will greatly aid when I return to the material in the future.

Social Program

Arguably the most fun part of any summer school is the social program. Oxford University’s social program two weeks ago was excellent, but Antwerp’s was quite good as well. I attended the Street Art Tour throughout Antwerp on Sunday night, a welcome dinner on Tuesday night, quiz night on Thursday night, and a social hour (drinks and hors d’oeuvres) on Friday evening. We also attended the Plantin-Moretus Museum (see here; also here) about 16th-18th century printing culture; this UNESCO World Heritage Site includes an extensive library and the entire archives of the Plantin-Moretus business. Ultimately, however, the social atmosphere extends beyond the programmatic schedule of the school itself, including the many discussions that we get to have with new colleagues and friends. I met people from all over Europe and beyond, but I think especially about the enriching conversations I had with new friends from Belgium (Ghent and Antwerp) and Italy (especially from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa). I’m especially appreciative for those who indulged me in celebrating the United States’ Independence Day (July 4th) with dinner, drinks, and intense political conversation which lasted well into the early hours of Friday.

Certificates

The Certificate of Attendance and the Micro-Credential Certificate for the summer school can be viewed below and on my Certificates and Awards page. I also completed a certification course on LinkedIn Learning called XML Essential Training also viewable here.

Conclusion

According to the Antwerp Summer University website (see here), the program for the DH summer school changes (albeit overlaps) year after year. Previous editions of the course focused on Processing and Analyzing Images (2018), Basic Skills for Archives and Editions (2019), Genetic Editing from manuscripts to born-digital writing processes (2022), and computer-assisted genetic editing (2023). The most overlap has been in the 2022-2024 iterations of the summer school. If, however, the program changes sufficiently enough and there are no conflicting summer schools that I need to prioritize, then I would certainly attend the program again. Until then, I look forward to the possibility of returning to Antwerp’s Digital Humanities Summer School (and Flanders/Belgium!) in the future.

About The Author

Matthew Saunders

Matthew Saunders is a PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He researches the languages and literatures of the ancient Near East, especially Aramaic Studies, Ugaritic Studies, and Comparative Semitics.

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