Developing a Community Code Review Process for Digital Humanities
Many digital humanities projects require some amount of programming. The programmer, who can be a researcher, a software developer, or someone in between, will write some code to achieve a project’s goals. The thing with programming, however, is that no matter how experienced or well-trained a programmer is, there will inevitably be bugs in the produced code if a certain complexity is reached. While some bugs might not affect the results of the code, there is a chance that they influence the results to an extent that they invalidate research findings. A wide-spread technique to minimize flaws in software are code reviews. In a code review, a programmer other than the author of a piece of code reviews the source code and gives recommendations on how the code could be improved. Besides leading to fewer bugs in the final version of the code, this can also improve the overall code quality by making the source code more readable and maintainable. Furthermore, code reviews can improve not just the skills of the reviewee but also of the reviewer. Code reviews are fairly easy to implement in teams of two or more developers, where one programmer can review another programmer’s code. However, in digital humanities projects, often there is just the one “techy” person who does all the coding with no colleague to review their code. In an effort to provide support and a community for not just these lone DH programmers but any “techy” person in digital humanities, a group of attendants of the DH2017 conference in Montreal founded DHTech (
https://dh-tech.github.io/#/) with the goal to provide a platform for exchange, collaboration, and support of people doing technical work in the digital humanities. Our workshop at ACH 2021 will bring together people that are interested in developing a community code review process for digital humanities. During the workshop, we will develop ideas and strategies for the different components such a process would require, such as guidelines for reviewers, social and cultural challenges a code review platform might face, or recognition systems. We envision the workshop to be the start of a working group that would work towards implementing the strategies developed during the workshop to set up a community code review process for the humanities. We invite anyone interested in developing such a process to participate in the workshop. Previous exposure or knowledge of code reviews is not required. We will provide a brief introduction about what code reviews are and how they are typically used before we separate into breakout groups to discuss specific questions. The workshop will conclude with summaries from the breakout sessions and the planning of follow up activities. This workshop will be capped at 40 participants.
Fair Copy
A Word Processor for Digital Humanities: FairCopy is a specialized word processor for studying manuscripts and historical texts. It gives scholars a desktop editing environment to create TEI encoded texts without writing XML code. In this workshop, we will demonstrate how to use FairCopy. We will then work in small groups with texts from the Library of Congress. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is an international consortium that publishes a set of guidelines for encoding digital representations of textual primary sources. In 2017, it was awarded the Antonio Zampolli Prize from the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, reflecting its impact over the last 30 years on the digital humanities. The TEI Guidelines have been used by hundreds of scholarly projects and are an essential tool for researching, preserving, and disseminating cultural heritage world-wide. And yet, despite its mission to provide a common vocabulary for describing texts, TEI faces problems of adoption and use in the wider scholarly community. While the basics of TEI XML encoding are simple enough, true fluency in TEI requires institutional support and commitment in the form of training, technical staff, IT infrastructure, and the time and commitment of the individual scholar. Many critical editing projects choose not to use TEI's guidelines because of these barriers. Even within institutions that have these resources, projects often adopt a simpler interface for domain experts to interact with. This interface then translates the scholar's work into TEI behind the scenes. This is sometimes accomplished technologically, sometimes through a tiered system of labor, or both. These interfaces are more often than not specialized to the needs of the projects which develop them. This current state of affairs leads to a structural problem of access which further limits whose texts can be digitized and preserved. FairCopy intervenes as a commercial solution that is focused on the needs of the individual scholar and their students. It provides a complete user interface layer over the TEI Simple schema. Scholars can seamlessly import and export TEI XML documents. They can also bring in IIIF images of primary resources and link them to their transcriptions. We believe that FairCopy will open up new possibilities for working with primary sources in the classroom. It removes a number of logistical impediments to teaching encoding, including marshalling source material images, teaching XML syntax, organization of files on the student's computer, etc. It allows the instructor to spend much more time on the concepts and concerns of close reading and marking up texts. FairCopy is desktop software for Mac, PC, and Linux. It is not software as a service. There is no logging in and no ability for the software to track the user. User data and identifying information remain on the user's computer. The software can work offline. FairCopy plans to launch in English, Spanish, and French initially, with localizations in more languages, including right-to-left reading languages, on the roadmap for next year. FairCopy is in early access and is available for free at
www.faircopyeditor.com. This workshop will be capped at 50 participants.
