{Sarah Lang}
{\LaTeX{} in the Digital Humanities}
{This talk explores the intersection of \LaTeX{} typesetting and the
digital humanities. More specifically, it asks why \LaTeX{} typesetting
is used so infrequently in the digital humanities, despite its clear
advantages and applications. This talk, on the one hand, aims to
understand the reasons why \LaTeX{} isn't more widely used in the
digital humanities and, on the other hand, presents three examples of
relevant use cases to illustrate its value for the (Digital) Humanities.

Conference proceedings that require full paper submissions, exemplified
by the Computational Humanities Conference, are becoming more prevalent
in the Digital Humanities and thus, present a good reason to get
acquainted with the necessary \LaTeX{} skills. This talk challenges the
notion suggested by Quinn Dombrowski that learning \LaTeX{} is too much
to ask of humanities scholars. Humanities scholars, even those with
minimal technical background, can learn \LaTeX{} at the necessary level
to format their submissions effectively, by using it essentially as a
markup language.

The second and most important use case for \LaTeX{} in the Digital
Humanities is in digital scholarly editing. There is a sizable digital
scholarly editing community within the field. One could even say that
digital scholarly editing is one of the core fields of work for digital
humanists. Digital scholarly editing is a domain where the field
initially flourished and continues to thrive, despite recent
developments involving deep learning driven approaches and Large
Language Model rendering the subfield of the ``Computational
Humanities'' more and more dominant. Digital scholarly editing will
continue to be a core task and technology within Digital Humanities;
thus, \LaTeX{} will continue to remain relevant to the
Digital~Humanities.\looseness-1

Despite early predictions that digital media would make physical books
obsolete, we observe in 2024 that this transformation has not yet
materialized and seems unlikely to occur in the near future. On the
contrary, the value of the book as a material object and a symbol of
cultural capital has surged, especially among younger audiences on
platforms like BookTok. While this trend might seem irrelevant to
academia per se, it underscores an important point: physical books
retain their importance to this day and continue to be favored by
textual scholars for various tasks, such as in-depth reading. This
enduring preference for printed materials highlights the need of
ensuring that digital humanities resources, such as digital scholarly
editions, can be effectively translated into print when necessary.
Transforming digital scholarly editions in \acro{TEI-XML} format to
\LaTeX{} allows us to produce print versions from digital editions, even
when the primary intent of the edition is not to publish in print.

Through the transformation of \acro{TEI} data using \XSLT, potentially
even employing large language models to generate \LaTeX{} code, scholars
can create high-quality printed materials with little effort. This
functionality is crucial for the digital humanities community, as it
responds to the frequent preference for accessible, printable formats,
which are particularly useful in teaching settings. While digital
editions offer unique benefits, like showcasing multiple witnesses or
versions without prioritizing a single one, there remains a substantial
demand for printed copies invaluable for detailed study, annotation, or
instructional use. The \texttt{reledmac} package is a particularly
useful tool for Digital Humanists.\looseness-1

The presentation also highlights the utility of \LaTeX{} in managing
complex documents within the humanities, such as archaeological
catalogs. In fields like archaeology, it is commonplace to compile
extensive catalogs of objects or findings as integral components of
larger research projects, such as Ph.D. dissertations. Such catalogs often
contain numerous images and can become unwieldy when managed with
standard word processing software like Microsoft Word due to their size.
Although this application is not exclusively within the digital
humanities, it underscores the relevance of \LaTeX{} across broader
humanities disciplines, as has been discussed previously on the \LaTeX{}
Ninja blog.\looseness-1}