Z656 Digital Publishing Standards and Systemes, Spring 2015, Section 30662

Contact information

Office: Wells Library 005B
Office Hours: Wednesdays 2:30pm–4:30pm.
Phone: (812) 856–0707
email: jawalsh@indiana.edu
Web: http://johnwalsh.name
Twitter: @jawalsh

Syllabus is subject to change, to suit the needs of the course.

Course description

This course will teach students to design and publish documents on the Web and for common eBook platforms such as iBook and Kindle. We will learn about XML-based document formats (such as TEI, DocBook, Office Open XML) and eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), a special-purpose programming language for transforming XML documents into other XML and non-XML formats. We will also learn to develop publications in common eBook formats, including ePub (iBook, etc.), AZW (Amazon Kindle), and KF8/AZW3 (Amazon Kindle).

Readings and other media

Assignments

Lab assignments (40%)

Most weeks we will have lab assignments related to the topic and readings for that week. You will have time to work on the assignment in class, and you will submit the finished assignment by Wednesday before our next class meeting.

Quizzes (15%)

We will have three quizzes throughout the semester. Quizzes will test basic knowledge about XML and related technologies (e.g. DTDs, schemas, XSLT, XPath).

Final project (35%)

For your final project, you will build design and build a digital publishing project. You can use the Apache Cocoon publishing platform, TEI Boilerplate, PHP, JAVA, HTML5 & CSS3, or a combination of other technologies. See the online journal Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) for an example of a Cocoon-based web site. There will be a couple of preliminary assignments, such as a project proposal and wireframing, designed to get you thinking about and planning the final product. You will present your final project to the class during the final class meeting of the semester. Details.

Participation (10%)

To earn the full participation credit, every student should make at least one substantive contribution to class per week.

Examples of substantive contributions include engaging in discussions, making a thoughtful comment, asking a thoughtful question, telling the class about a relevant article or news story or web site or tool, publicly and thoughtfully answering others’ questions, routinely helping a fellow student during lab time, etc. It is especially important that students do the reading and view the videos in advance of class and come to class with questions about anything that is unclear. It is my hope that most of our class time will be devoted to hands-on work, rather than me rehashing material that was covered in the readings. For this to work, students will need to be prepared and ready with questions about any unclear material covered outside of the classroom.

Schedule

15 January (week 1):

Topic
XML review. Overview of course.
Readings
Lab/Assignment
Creating well-formed XML documents

22 January (week 2):

Topic
XML and CSS
Readings
Lab/Assignment
XML/CSS Lab

29 January (week 3):

Topic
XML and the Document Object Model (DOM)
Readings
Lab/Assignment
DOM Lab

5 February (week 4):

Topic
XSLT and XPath
Readings:
Lab/Assignment
XPath/XSLT Lab

12 February (week 5)

Topic
XSLT: Elements and Attributes
Readings
  • Marini, J. (2014). XML Essentials on Lynda.com. View section 8 (about 19 minutes).
  • DuCharme, B. (2001). XSLT Quickly. pp. 47–83.
Lab/Assignment
Counting with XSLT

19 February (week 6)

Topic
XSLT: Conditional processing
Readings
  • Marini, J. (2014). XML Essentials on Lynda.com. View section 8 (about 19 minutes) (repeat).
  • DuCharme, B. (2001). XSLT Quickly. pp. 84–148.
Lab/Assignment
Conditional statements with XSLT

26 February (week 7)

Topic
XSLT: Numbers and strings and such…
Readings
Lab/Assignment
XSLT: Variables, strings and math

5 March (week 8)

Topic
XSLT: Numbers and strings and such…
Readings
  • DuCharme, B. (2001). XSLT Quickly. pp. 205–256.
Lab/Assignment
XSLT Keys

12 March (week 9)

Topic
XML publishing systems: Cocoon, XTF, eXist, TEI Boilerplate.
Readings
Lab/Assignment

19 March (spring break)

26 March (week 10)

Topic
DTDs and Schemas
Reading
Lab/Assignment
Write a DTD

2 April (week 11)

Topic
Schemas
Readings
Lab/Assignment

9 April (week 12)

Topic

Document publishing with HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Readings
Lab/Assignment

16 April (week 13)

Topic
eBook formats (ePUB, mobi, azw3)
Readings
Lab/Assignment

23 April (week 14)

Final project presentations

30 April (week 15): TBD

Resources

CSS learning resources
CSS reference resources
Digital Library Brown Bag Series

A series of Wednesday afternoon talks on digital library topics. Many of the topics are directly relevant to the content of our course.

All presentations are in the Herman B. Wells Library from 12:00–1:00 pm EST.

You can watch live presentations via Adobe Connect: http://connect.iu.edu/diglib. If you are not a registered Connect user, select “Enter as Guest”.

To receive a reminder and an abstract for each presentation, send an email to
iulist@iulist.indiana.edu with the message body:
sub dl-brownbag-l Your Full Name

Oxygen Webinars
XML-Related Quick Reference Cards from Mulberry Technologies
Quick reference cards in PDF format. Topics include XML 1.0 Syntax Quick Reference, XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0 Quick Reference, XSLT 2.0 Quick Reference, etc.
XSL-List
Email forum for XSL discussion/help. Before posting to the list, consult the “Before you Post” guidelines at http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list/index.html#before-you-post.
Cafe con Leche XML News and Resources
Elliotte Rusty Harold’s web page, with many useful resources, particularly the Tutorials and Seminar Notes.