Courses Year One

ANTIDOTE offers a training course on two levels, for beginners and for expert students and staff.

Training for beginners

The training course for beginners consists of two five-day sessions where students participate first in beginner-level training before moving on to more advanced-level training.

(a) Beginner-level training — Klosterneuburg Abbey Library, Klosterneuburg, Austria, March 3–7, 2025

This five-day training session will offer an introduction to the principles of encoding medieval texts in the Latin alphabet with TEI-compatible XML, including the encoding and display of special characters with the Unicode font standard and the recommendations of the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI), the encoding of abbreviations and expansions, paleographic features, layout and textual structure in medieval manuscripts. Instruction will be in the form of lectures and workshops where students will engage in hands-on training.

(b) Advanced-level training — University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland, June 23–27, 2025

This five-day advanced workshop will build on the skills developed in the beginner-level session and focus on practical projects based on big data (data scraping, OCR, HTR, crowdsourcing), data wrangling and cleaning, corpus-linguistic and computational techniques for information extraction, as well as visualization options.

The two sessions combined amount to 5 ECTS credits.

This training course is intended for graduate students at, or affiliated with, the partner universities. Requirements:

  • BA or MA degree in hand.
  • Registration as student at one of the partner universities (or their affiliates).
  • Background in history, philology or any form of medieval studies. Preference will be given to candidates having familiarity with medieval manuscripts and documents.

Information on how to apply with a link to the application form is here.

Expert training

The training course for the Expert Trainees consists of two five-day sessions. The first workshop offers advanced training with a thematic focus. During the second workshop the Expert Trainees will work with the students from the beginner’s training course on joint projects building on the skills they have learned in week one.

(a) Workshop — Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, May 19-23, 2025

The theme for this workshop is Scale and Scalability. Topics covered at this workshop will include data scraping, OCR, HTR, data wrangling and cleaning, corpus-linguistic and computational techniques for information extraction, as well as visualization options.

(b) Workshop — University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland, June 23–27, 2025

At this workshop the Expert Trainees and the students from the Beginners course work on joint projects around the theme of big data and scale, using the techniques taught in the first workshop.