This time, really learn XPath: Task-oriented XPath training for document archeology and project management (Advanced TEI/XML)
Instructors: Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar and David J. Birnbaum
Target audience: Participants should have at least elementary prior experience with XSLT or XQuery, such as that provided by an introductory tutorial or workshop.
Description: Coders of XML and members of the TEI community, including those who have completed advanced XSLT training workshops, often discover that their understanding and command of XPath (including regular expression processing) is not sufficient for their development needs. Our course will devote serious, sustained attention to writing and applying XPath in a variety of frameworks (including XSLT, XQuery, and Schematron), with a variety of materials (including XML and plain-text documents), and involving a variety of task types (such as “date arithmetic” and “string surgery”). Participants will explore in detail path expressions, patterns, sequence expressions, type expressions, regular expressions, predicates, operators, functions (from the core library and user-defined), and other features, and will practice these in different XML-related contexts (including XSLT, XQuery, and Schematron). We will teach the use of XPath in Schematron together with its use in XSLT to highlight similarities in its role in these technologies, used, respectively, to validate documents and to transform them for publication and other reuse. The course will assist coders with complex processing of information from markup and from plain text, with emphasis on 1) sharing strategies for systematically building archives and databases, and 2) increasing participants’ confidence and fluency in extracting information coded in XML in those archives and databases. Students enrolled in this course will emerge with strengthened skills in systematic encoding, document processing, and project management.
The course immerses participants in the following technologies:
- Regular expressions (including their use in up-conversion from plain text and in XPath functions)
- XPath
- Schematron
- XSLT
- XQuery
Note: Because this course requires prior experience with XSLT or XQuery, it should be scheduled in the second week of the DHSI, with basic XSLT or XQuery courses in the first week. Participants in our workshop will need to have some basic XPath and XSLT experience, since ours is intended as an advanced XPath workshop, and rather than teaching these other technologies entirely from scratch, we will concentrate on expanding our participants’ XPath competence in contexts that they are likely to encounter in building and managing projects.