As previously announced (http://beta.tapasproject.org/content/neh-fund-development-tapas-classroom), TAPAS has received a new line of grant funding through the NEH to build TAPAS Classroom. TAPAS Classroom will extend our project services and site features to support teachers and students of the TEI. We are really excited about the developments afforded by this grant, as they will both contribute to the teaching and learning of the TEI as well as lay the necessary groundwork for introducing future features that respond to the developing needs of the broader TAPAS community.
Below, we've included an overview of some of the cool features we are considering for this next development phase, which will run through the Fall of 2017. We are still actively seeking feedback from the TAPAS community to guide our work on TAPAS Classroom. If you have ideas for Classroom features or would like to help us better understand your needs as a teacher or student of the TEI, please contact as at info@tapasproject.org.
We have also convened a group of advisors to help us design and test new features of this grant. If you are interested in a more formal role in the development of TAPAS Classroom, please consider joining us! Email us at info@tapasproject.org for more details.
TAPAS Classroom Features
Discussion
TAPAS Classroom seeks to help facilitate class discussions of the TEI. We are integrating our forums feature into project spaces to allow project managers to manage dedicated course forums. These forums will be private and accessible only to approved members of a project. We are also looking into supporting image and pdf file upload to forum posts to better support conversations on markup.
Curricular Materials
A primary objective of TAPAS Classroom is to help teachers store and share curricular materials through TAPAS. Users will now have the ability to upload both TEI and PDF formatted curricular content into the TAPAS repository and access their content in their project dashboards. The TAPAS Commons will also make it easier for users to discover curricular materials publicly contributed by the TAPAS community.
Reading Interface
One feature of TAPAS Classroom we are all very excited about is a new side-by-side reading view. Users will be able to select multiple records from a project and compare them side-by-side in the same reading interface. Each view will support toggling between stylesheets to facilitate multi-file analysis.
Enhanced Views and Stylesheets
A major addition of TAPAS Classroom will be a suite of newly developed stylesheets that focus on encoding and analysis practices of the TEI classroom. Below is an initial list of views we are looking into supporting. We are still hoping to learn more about ways the TAPAS community finds it useful to display TEI data in instruction--do you use TEI Boilerplate? Have you made any adaptations or new stylesheets of your own? Do you focus on the raw XML? Contact us at info@tapasproject.org to share any feedback or questions you may have.
Improved XML View
This view would offer improved formatting for viewing the XML code of TEI records, with features like better line wrapping, syntax highlighting, and XML folding.
XML Comments View
This formatted view of TEI records would allow readers to toggle on and off views of a file's XML comments to more readily access and track editorial and markup decisions.
Metadata View
This view would provide a more detailed and clearly styled view of TEI record metadata.
Inspector
This view would offer summary statistics of included elements, attributes, and other content data.
Color Coding and Encoding Visualization
This set of views would provide color coding of, for example, values of @ana, or color formatting to make visible the use of different TEI elements at different structural levels.
Ography Index
This view would offer better indexing of associated Ography data at the record level to help readers analyze and navigate the TEI and its content.
Validation
We will be making improvements to our validation framework to provide users more intelligible error and warning reports. We are also exploring the possibility of enabling users to receive validation reports on their TEI documents; this feature may be developed more fully in a future grant.
Resources
We are developing our TEI resources page to address the needs of teachers and students. This page will include course development resources for instructors, scholarly bibliographies for student research, as well as a range of other documentation, guides, and FAQs to respond to the specific needs of this community.