Elisa Beshero-Bondar PRO
Professor of Digital Humanities and Chair of the Digital Media, Arts, and Technology Program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.
Invisible XML in the
Digital Humanities Classroom
The perils and possibilites of ixml
in an Undergraduate Text Analysis course
Invisible XML Symposium: 27 February 2026
Michael Simons and Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Molly Wright and Lauren McCurdy
Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
How we began teaching ixml
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Social capital! Knowing people matters
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David Birnbaum
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"Battle-testers" DIGIT 496 group
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Generation 2: Michael Simons, Molly Wright, Lauren McCurdy
Generation 1: Michael Simons, Caleb King, Dannika Love
Consequences
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Obsession & Greta Van Zeppelin
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Trying to teach it again, ourselves
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Multiple student presentations (hello!)
2026:
Our own “Digit” ixml materials
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leading to XProc orientation
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Hopefully students want to try on their projects...
Writing your own ixml:
Guiding students through the process
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how to work through creating xml with ixml
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"outside in" or "inside out"?
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lack of syntax assistance in standard code editors
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similar to regex (good or bad?)
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similar to Relax NG (good or bad?)
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should this ever be taught *before* these technologies? (we're not sure)
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“Outside In”
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Greta Van Zeppelin approach [ Phase 1 | Phase 2 ]
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get the outer structure, and move to XSLT + regex matching for the internal complexities
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By August's Balisage conference, we learned better ixml and learned we *could* have matched it all with a grammar (at least, with a better raw text format). We just weren't ready in March 2025.
“Inside Out”
- Pokemon Moves database file with its detachable heading
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John Lumley's workbench as a starting point
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gradually work up to testing
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scaling up:
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Coffeepot for small samples
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Markup Blitz for longer samples
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XProc for collections!
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The perils and possibilities of
whitespace recognition and matching
Invisible XML trickery!
Looks easier than it is? Becomes obsessive...!
Why are we doing this?
Even if the students never use it again...
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heavily related to the other things we teach
regex, Relax NG, the whole XML stack) -
skills installing open-source software
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someone ALWAYS finds it obsessive... ;-)
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The rest of world (around us...university world...) talks about proprietary computer programming on "unstructured text."
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ixml, to us, is about finding and celebrating structure and learning alternative ways to the main stream
ixml-dh-teach
By Elisa Beshero-Bondar
ixml-dh-teach
Is Invisible XML Ready for College Students?: Trying iXML and XProc on a Music Analysis Project in an Undergraduate Text Analysis Course at Penn State Behrend.
