Angles – an online XML editor for the text encoding community


So I programmed most of my morning away by working on Angles, one of the project I’m
contributing to at MITH.

Angles will eventually be “an online XML editor tuned to the needs of the scholarly text encoding community”. Development of this project in-house is limited: the idea is to develop components via “code-sprints” at events where the DH community gathers. I wasn’t there, but at the last TEI Members Meeting a few people put together a TEI validation component.

We’re building Angles on top of the Ace editor, which is already quite powerful. We’re adding components to do validation, save files in the browser local storage, handle validation errors and other notifications. Eventually we’d like to include contextual help, i.e. show a description of the TEI element where your typing cursor is or suggest elements that can be contained in your current element. Basically those features that commercial XML editors provide that are so essential when authoring TEI. The next code sprint will be happening in Lincoln, Nebraska in July, during DH2013. It’ll be informal, so you won’t find it on the program, but we’ll make sure to spread the word to interested developers. If you’re interested, send us an email! The code is available on GitHub.

Here’s a list of features we’d like to work on with you at the next code sprint:

  • notifications
  • unit tests
  • context-sensitive help
  • ODD integration

 

I’ve been spending some time this morning setting up Backbone.js models and views to handle notifications. Angles uses a centralized event dispatcher with Backbone, so I’ve added a new event that allows to push one or more structure messages (notifications) to the UI.

 

Getting started

There have been quite a few changes since last year in my Digital Humanities and everyday life. I moved from London to Washington D.C. this January to start working as a full-time Research Programmer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). I see this as a huge step ahead for me and I’ve been learning a lot in the past two months and a bit.

I’m still working on my thesis, so I’m still affiliated with King’s College London as a PhD student and I’m still working with the Weber-Gesamtausgabe in Germany for my case study. Their Freischütz Digital project is moving fast and I’m helping with modelling the TEI libretto edition and the MEI-powered edition of the music score. I sometimes blog about this work and related research on It is not Sound.

Today

Today I’m at MITH and most of my time will be spent working on Angles, a browser-based XML editor. In my next post I’ll give an overview of Angles and of The Shelley-Godwin Archive, the two MITH projects in which I’m involved. During my lunch break, I’ll have a quick Skype talk with colleagues at the Du Chemin project, an editorial project of renaissance music, to talk about next steps in the project’s development. I’ll write a short post about this too.

Cherry Blossoms at the Tidal Basin, D.C.

My working day won’t be going too far into the evening today: being new in D.C., I am still distracted by new, exciting things to do and see. So at 6.30pm I’m going to get on a boat and marvel at the Japanese cherry blossoms in the Tidal Basin 🙂