Its benefits are that it’s very simple – given it’s simple text file based nature – and not very data-intensive, thus ideal for long-term archiving. The eXtensible Markup Language is a text-based data storage format. However, I think they are really enough to understand XML (although I’m open to feedback if you find that this isn’t the case). But because I’m not physically in the same room with you to answer all the questions which come up, I needed to write a few paragraphs after all. That’s why I wanted to provide a super short blog post (ended up being longer than I meant it to be). While this may certainly be considered a crash course, in my experience it actually works. On the flip side, my boss tends to introduce XML in just one slide. Some of the supposedly “gentle” introductions to XML (see resources list below) really are quite long and overwhelming. I feel that annotation is a concept most Humanities scholars are familiar with – even when they don’t realize that yet. XML really is quite easy to understand, especially to Humanities people. Because despite everything there is to be said about XML in the Digital Humanities, it’s really quite simple and everybody can learn it. But then I realized: You don’t need a perfect intro, you need a simplistic intro, so you don’t get lost in the clutter.
Given that I teach XML regularly, there are so many great tutorials out there already and it’s such a fundamental skill in the DH, I panicked. So far, this hasn’t happened yet because I kind of froze up due to perfectionism. As some of you might know, I have been promising to provide an intro to XML for a long time.
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