For those interested in learning more about or working with text encoding, TEI, or various computational approaches to humanistic scholarship, it would be really helpful if you already had a plain text editor on your preferred computing device (PCD). Since PCDs come in a three principle flavors — Windows, Mac, and Linux — it might be useful to list a few links to various offerings:

• For Windows users, a lot of people love love love NotePad++, which in addition to having a lot of plug-ins and other extensions, also has a very active user community that can fix or build just about anything.
• For Mac users, Textmate remains a popular choice, as does Sublime Edit, both are free to download. TM is now open sourced, and Sublime has a very liberal trial period. There is also always BBEdit, which is available through the App Store. (For those wanting the pure command line experience, Vim and Emacs are built into Mac OS X.)
• I won’t even dare attempt GUI plain text editors for Linux. Use Vim or Emacs and mutter at each other as you like.

Whatever your choice in plain text editor, if it doesn’t contain with syntax highlighting for XML, then look to see about adding that functionality if you can.

In a recent post on his site, William G. Thomas, whom some of you may recognize as the chair of the History department at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and/or the author of the essay on “Computing and the Historical Imagination” in A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004), offers a typology of digital scholarship. While I’m not crazy about his matrix (see the linked PDF), it might be useful, given the wide range of experiences and interests present in those attending, as a starting point for a discussion about what all the umbrella of digital humanities now covers. (In addition to the Companion above, there are continual attempts on The Humanist, as noted here, to define DH.) Some of this ground is also covered in the narrative for the Louisiana DH Lab, which Clai Rice and I wrote (in what seems like years ago).

It’s good to know that there’s interest in both text mining and text encoding. I have some experience with both, but I really hope we can get Jonathan Goodwin and Clai Rice, respectively, to join the conversation. I look forward to everyone just being there and all of us both working on stuff we brought and on stuff that others have brought to the table. Do we want a common GitHub repo to add materials, too, or do we want to set up individual repos for various topics? (I know when I was a participant in the NEH Seminar on Networks and Network Studies in the Humanities, walking away with a flash drive full of software and data sets and white papers was a huge bonus. We don’t need flash drives any more…