This half-day in-person workshop introduces textual scholars and practitioners to LEAF-Writer, a lightweight web-based editor that enables TEI+RDF encoding in the user’s browser without installing any software. This workshop speaks directly to one of the conference sub-themes of “Annotating | Beyond Patterns: Interpretation with Small Data”. LEAF-Writer is an editor for documents encoded following the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. It enables researchers to create small-scale datasets with researcher-defined nuanced semantic interpretations to produce high-quality Linked Open Data (LOD) based on either standard named entity authorities or an individual project’s corpus of named entities.

LEAF stands for the Linked Editing Academic Framework, a collaborative software suite that provides a set of modular tools for text editing and publication. The LEAF Commons tools constitute an accessible, low-barrier, no-cost infrastructure for researchers to produce online texts, editions, or collections, whether for teaching or for undertaking research and collaboration on a sustainable basis. The LEAF Commons tools are freely available in the browser, enabling collaboration and publication through Github, in addition to permitting local storage. Promoting the reuse of data in keeping with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles, LEAF uses open-source software, open-access platforms, and open international standards for best practices in text-encoding (TEI-XML) and web annotation (RDF). LEAF-Writer is part of a suite of web-based, easy-to-use tools ‘LEAF Commons’ (meaning that they function both inside and outside the LEAF-VRE platform) that supports a range of activities from text encoding, named entity recognition, web annotation, text analysis and publication all running in the user’s browser without them having to learn complex coding languages.

LEAF-Writer: an open-source, open-access Extensible Markup Language (XML) editor that runs in a web browser offering scholars and their students a rich textual editing experience without the need to download, install, and configure proprietary software, pay ongoing subscription fees, or learn complex coding languages. This user-friendly editing environment incorporates TEI and Resource Description Framework (RDF) standards, meaning that texts edited in LEAF-Writer are interoperable both with other texts produced by the scholarly editing community and with other materials produced for the Semantic Web. It also incorporates Named Entity reconciliation using linked open data identifiers to standard authorities or a project’s own corpus of named entities. LEAF-Writer is particularly valuable for pedagogical purposes, allowing instructors to teach students best practices for encoding texts without also having to teach students how to code.

While this workshop will concentrate on one of these tools, LEAF-Writer Commons, it will introduce some of the other LEAF Commons tools:

DToC: (the Dynamic Table of Contexts) provides an online interactive reading and publication environment for digital scholarly texts where the two conventional overviews provided in print editions - the table of contents and the index - have been dynamically merged to provide an interactive online e-reading experience that leverages the power of TEI XML markup.

LEAF-TE: (The LEAF Turning Engine) is a web interface that enables users to easily and automatically transform documents between a number of formats to TEI XML suitable for importing into LEAF-Writer. It also exports from LEAF-Writer to HTML, Markdown, RDF, CSV, and plain text for publication or use in other workflow tools.

NERVE: (the Named Entity Relationship and Vetting Environment) is an application that performs Named Entity Recognition (NER) on machine-readable texts, allowing users to identify candidate entities in a document, review, and correct the results. Users can reconcile data to an authority and export their reconciled data in TEI-XML or HTML formats to an online repository or to their desktop.

LEAF promotes best practices, reuse, and sustainability in the production of digital scholarship in the humanities through tools bridging the gap between scholars with (en)coding skills and those without. LEAF Commons offers communities of researchers, teachers, and students the opportunity to take part in digital knowledge production and open collaboration. The workshop will end with an open discussion about pursuing such forms of open knowledge production and collaboration. The LEAF team has conducted similar workshops at disciplinary conferences and in consultation with project teams over the past few years (see bibliography, below).