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  1. Syllabus
  2. Session 6
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  • In this session
  • The web as an interface
  • HTML, CSS, XML — the minimum
  • GitHub Pages
  • Reading for Session 7
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  1. Syllabus
  2. Session 6

Session 6

Data publication: the web as interface

Author
Affiliation

Tobias Hodel

Walter Benjamin Kolleg / Digital Humanities, University of Bern

Published

20 October 2026

Modified

2 September 2026

Hodel Taught by Tobias Hodel.

In this session

  • A very short introduction to HTML, CSS and XML
  • Web basics: how a page actually reaches a browser
  • GitHub Pages introduction (approx. 45 minutes)

The web as an interface

Publication is not the last step after the research; it is part of the argument. What a reader can see, sort, search and download is a claim about what matters in your data.

HTML, CSS, XML — the minimum

  • HTML: elements, attributes, nesting; structure versus appearance
  • CSS: selectors and rules; why separating the two matters for reuse
  • XML: the same tree model, but for your own vocabulary — the bridge to TEI next week
  • What “valid” and “well-formed” mean, and why a schema is a data model in disguise

GitHub Pages

The practical core of the session, and the route to your assignment website. The Git and GitHub guide has the whole of this written out, including the two ways a Pages site gets built and the mistakes everyone makes once.

  • Publishing a repository as a website
  • Markdown as source, HTML as output
  • Static site generators, briefly — what Quarto (this site) or Jekyll do for you
  • Custom domains, and why you probably do not need one
  • Getting your first page online today
TipIn parallel in the Lab

The DH Lab covers APIs the same week, including the Zotero API — which is one good way to get your bibliography onto the site you build here.

Reading for Session 7

Sahle, Patrick. 2017. “What Is a Scholarly Digital Edition?” In Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices, edited by Matthew James Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo. Open Book Publishers. http://books.openedition.org/obp/3397

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