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This thesis explores content design – an area which encompasses the practices and the conceptions of the description, organisation and manipulation of digital content. The overall aim was to identify and examine principles, methods and tools appropriate for content design within the humanities and the social sciences. Another purpose was to investigate the limitations and opportunities of the identified methods and tools by means of modelling and applications of prosopographical materials, designed for research and teaching in history of education. The prosopographical collection consists of three different kinds of sources: transcriptions from biographical reference books, written biographical accounts and digitalised archival sources, such as enrolment registers. These resources were encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines with the purpose to denote specific structures and semantic features of the content. The thesis demonstrates how the prosopographical collection, stored in a master file in TEI/XML format, was encoded and organised and then further transformed, migrated and manipulated by other tools and to other platforms. This resulted in several examples of applications demonstrating a broad range of uses for research and teaching in history of education and alike. One conclusion is that the TEI guidelines serve well as a valuable tool for the markup of rather complex historical materials designed for multiple purposes: for qualitative analyses, and as input to multivariate statistical analyses, and for migration into relational databases. Another conclusion is that such digital collections, provided with markup, could be treated as research tools themselves, because they lend themselves much more than simply access, retrieval or reading. In this prosopographical collection, the markup contributes to make explicit the underlying theories and thus provides scholars, teachers and students with tools to reuse and rearrange the content for other kinds of uses in other areas.

This thesis explores content design – an area which encompasses the practices and the conceptions of the description, organisation and manipulation of digital content. The overall aim was to identify and examine principles, methods and tools appropriate for content design within the humanities and the social sciences. Another purpose was to investigate the limitations and opportunities of the identified methods and tools by means of modelling and applications of prosopographical materials, designed for research and teaching in history of education. The prosopographical collection consists of three different kinds of sources: transcriptions from biographical reference books, written biographical accounts and digitalised archival sources, such as enrolment registers. These resources were encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines with the purpose to denote specific structures and semantic features of the content. The thesis demonstrates how the prosopographical collection, stored in a master file in TEI/XML format, was encoded and organised and then further transformed, migrated and manipulated by other tools and to other platforms. This resulted in several examples of applications demonstrating a broad range of uses for research and teaching in history of education and alike. One conclusion is that the TEI guidelines serve well as a valuable tool for the markup of rather complex historical materials designed for multiple purposes: for qualitative analyses, and as input to multivariate statistical analyses, and for migration into relational databases. Another conclusion is that such digital collections, provided with markup, could be treated as research tools themselves, because they lend themselves much more than simply access, retrieval or reading. In this prosopographical collection, the markup contributes to make explicit the underlying theories and thus provides scholars, teachers and students with tools to reuse and rearrange the content for other kinds of uses in other areas.