Grant Dickie – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Looking Back and Looking Ahead: Interedition Symposium 2012

Grant Dickie — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 19:08:53 +0000

Why do informal hackathons matter in the Digital Humanities community? I argue that the answer can be found by reading the (soon to be written and released) proceedings of the Interedition Symposium: Scholarly Digital Editions, Tools and Infrastructure. Joris Van Zundert, a member of the Huygens Institut in The Hague, Netherlands, played host to over 40 scholars, researchers, and programmers this past March. I got to meet Joris last year when I was invited through former MITH project lead Doug Reside and my work on the TILE project. The well-spoken and incredibly intelligent Van Zundert has been working on the Interedition project since 2008 to promote interdisciplinary, inter-collegial, and inter-departmental work in the Digital Humanities. To quote their website’s advert for the Symposium, Interedition sponsors groups of programmer-scholars (such as Doug, MITH Software Architect Jim Smith, and myself) to gather and develop interoperable tools as well as generate “roadmaps” toward crossing institutional boundaries and research schedules to get DH centers to work collaboratively. March 2012 not only marked the ending of the general funding for Interedition but also a celebration of its efforts.

The festivities came in the form of a two-day series of presentations from researchers and programmers connected with Interedition, or at least sharing its ideals of collaboration. Interedition invites and encourages others to participate in all of their events, thus practicing their own preaching about cross-institutional collaboration. Speakers ranged from different disciplines in the Humanities, the tech industry, and researchers dabbling in code.

I’ve participated since early 2011 with two Interedition Bootcamps and have worked with Asaf Bartov, Moritz Wissenbach, and Marco Petris on annotation tools inspired by early Open Annotation Collaboration specifications. On behalf of those efforts, Moritz, Marco and I presented the annotation service infrastructure and related clients at the March Symposium. I opened by discussing the lack of true interoperable data in the TILE project: that we still have necessary development to be done on integrating different data streams and sources into TILE. What OAC offered the group at Interedition was a more interoperable format for storing annotation data, that is, the data is separated out from the presentation and analysis of the data. Marco and Moritz went on to demonstrate their annotation clients – a Google Chrome plugin that generates a copy of any XML text data to be annotated, and a GWT client that downloads text and allows users to create annotated highlights of the text. Both of these clients use the RAXLD Ruby-on-Rails annotation storage and retrieval service (Developer: Asaf Bartov) and the Java-based fragment-context server (Developers: Marco and Moritz).

The slides for our presentation are open and can be found here.

The proceedings of the Symposium were too packed and full of interesting subjects that, during our presentation, I had little time to explain the real importance of Interedition and my sub-project. Put simply, the experience of interacting with international programmers whom I would never have met in another conference or local THATCamps or hackathons, is enough for me to support the causes of Interedition. Open venues where programmers and career coders can meet up are sources of peer-to-peer learning, development, and progress in a career such as mine. This works for the academic field of Digital Humanities too: whether it is working for a powerhouse such as MITH or for a college humanities professor, DH is about learning from other’s open-source work. As Doug Reside pointed out in his presentation on the first day of the symposium, hackathons serve as the career-developers scholarly conference. COST, Europe’s funding agency for the Arts and Sciences, has somewhat unknowingly backed up funding for Bootcamps that extend over several days, allowing for evenly paced hacking sessions that felt more like structured projects in some cases. When Van Zundert closed the Symposium with a 30-minute presentation on the work of Interedition from a birds-eye view, he advocated this about the format and methodology of his bootcamps: a day-long hackathon is easy to generate and fund, but produces limited results. Week-long sessions require funding and additional planning, but can produce elegant work such as Interedition’s Collate and CollateX services. Thus is a successful and enjoyable format for programmer interchange born.

Looking ahead, longer bootcamps found around the world at DHSI, Bamboo, and DARIAH are still needed and still need to be refined. Bamboo has encountered obstacles in its path of developing interoperable cloud tools, as has Interedition in its organization and funding. Yet instead of abandoning global and cross-institutional efforts such as these, it is vital to continue them because we are still working out the kinks on something great. In terms of Interedition-scale Bootcamps, developers such as myself need these to enthuse collaboration and discovery just as traditional scholars need to meet face-to-face once every year or more to share research and align their goals. Despite the rise of remote resource management tools such as Github and Basecamp in the open-source programming world, real human interaction is still important, so an argument that we all work on the internet and do not require anything more intimate is false. When creating quick mock-ups and prototypes for research and development for digital tools, having colleagues right at hand allows for quick development and sharing of knowledge. Skype doesn’t allow the kind of inspirational moments that come from sharing time with a group of people, eating with them, then meeting later at the hotel to work even longer (all traditions that we kept at each Interedition Bootcamp).

Programmers are indeed pro-active at times and so our group, post-Symposium, wasted no time talking about what is next. Interedition continues to work to find additional funding and ways to continue offering programmers and research-field insiders the means to interact in hands-on sessions. Van Zundert has accepted the mantle of head of Interedition and will be in charge of seeing his framework of informal bootcamps and planning sessions live on. Whether Interedition gets picked up by another series of funding now or in the future, I assert that it will serve as a marker for the way in which open-source, academic programming careers will operate.

Learn more about Interedition on their website (http://www.interedition.eu). To get more involved, contact Joris Van Zundert at joris DOT van DOT zundert AT gmail DOT com.

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Reports from GLAM Camp

Grant Dickie — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:40:39 +0000

MITH’s strategic mission, as stated on the About MITH page, is to be the “University’s [of Maryland’s] primary intellectual hub for scholars and practitioners of digital humanities, electronic literature, and cyberculture” [sic]. Put another way, a local center for all things related to digital knowledge in the humanities. This means that we go out and spread out expertise in development of our own scholarly digital tools, the world of Digital Humanities, and our passion to support that world’s importance. In the past, I have been an example of this by attending events in the European Union, Canada, and closer to home in the District of Columbia.
The mission of Galleries, Libraries, Museums and Archives CAMP (better known as GLAMCamp) clearly overlaps with the mission of MITH. GLAM is an international initiative to produce case studies and outreach for cultural heritage institutions to open up their data and make it more accessible to the online public. A list of their more recent projects can be found here. Within the scope of their mission are organizing public outreach events such as attending Wikimania, setting up GLAM conferences, and setting up and hosting GLAMCamps.

Friday, February 10th through Sunday, February 12th I attended the first DC-based GLAMCamp at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) building in Penn Quarter. Behind the solemn doors and security blockades, we hacked, hashed out a GLAM/US Portal for all library and museum researchers, and networked in a space not more than 40 feet from the U.S. Constitution. Asaf Bartov, one of the colleagues from Interedition and the Small-Grants coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation, invited me to this event to provide my Javascript interface expertise. What I eventually found at the event was a diverse group of dedicated Wikipedia contributors, educators, and general enthusiasts.

The proceedings of the conference were dutifully recorded in a wiki-embedded series of Etherpads and wikis. It is impressive how much is recorded and transcribed into these items. While a larger group was in the main conference area working on documentation for GLAM researchers to take part in wikis, I was in the “Techie Cave” slogging away with Asaf. Inspired by work done by Australian Digital Library to generate Wiki Citations automatically, we decided to work on a generalized Wiki Citation Engine to be used in any browser. What we ended up with is a rough prototype for generating citations using a Ruby Server and my Javascript: https://github.com/jdickie/GLAMCamp. Despite the roughness, the participants were no less enthusiastic about the project when we presented at the closing on Sunday. Alongside our demonstration was a presentation on workflows for Bulk Uploading data into Wikipedia from GLAMs; a draft for a publication to hand out to GLAMs and get them informed and involved in the movement; and a GLAM/US portal wiki page for enticing more participants in the movement. Three days therefore became a very productive time within the confines of NARA.

What can the University of Maryland and MITH benefit from such events as these? First, we broaden our knowledge base and network. The more institutions know about us, the more people we have supporting our mission, and, likewise, the more we are supporting others’ missions. Second, MITH is not just a center for research – it is a development office for scholarly tools. Things such as workflow scenarios for Bulk Uploading to Wikimedia Commons and a citation engine for Wiki citations are things that scholars as well as GLAMs are interested to see available. Often it becomes necessary to work outside of the office and with other like minds to achieve this kind of development. Already, we are discussing presenting the proceedings and ideas from GLAM to the McKeldin Library administrators.

Looking ahead, GLAM promises to be an exciting opportunity for MITH as well as the research world.

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Report: Workshop on Tools for Digital Scholarly Editions (Cologne, Germany)

Grant Dickie — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:23:45 +0000

Link to the Event

On Monday, November 28th and Tuesday, November 29th, Dave Lester (Creative Lead for MITH) and I (Web Developer for MITH) attended the Institute fuer Dokumentologie and Editorik (I-D-E) workshop for Tools for Digital Scholarly Editions held at the University of Cologne, Germany. Alexander Czmiel from the University of Berlin and fellow for the I-D-E had invited Dave Lester and then me to the conference to give a report on the Text and Image Linking Environment (TILE) project. In addition, I helped organize a report on my work done with the Interedition team for interoperable annotation clients. This would be MITH’s first appearance on the scene of the University of Cologne, which houses multiple institutions for Digital Humanities related projects and research affiliates: the I-D-E, as mentioned before, the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH) and the International Center for Archival Research (ICARus).

After arriving at the workshop location, which was at a rather new and improved location on the Cologne campus, we met with Alexander Czmiel and his colleague, Patrick Sahle. As participants filtered in, Patrick and Alex started things off by introducing themselves and their mission: to establish a global community of Digital Humanities programmers focused on working together on scholarly editions. Their point is similar to that of Interedition, which focuses on establishing programmer networks to prevent duplicity of efforts and tools. To paraphrase Joris Van Zundert, lead for the Interedition project, “You don’t need two collation engines

[sic]”. Indeed, as every one of the approximately 40 participants introduced themselves, we found many intersections in our projects and in our research. In order to better work together, the workshop was set for each of us to unconference ideas together and brainstorm ways forward. The workshop’s focus then quickly switched to what, exactly, it is that each of us is working on and how it might be different or similar.

To aid with this, we proceeded to give or listen to a series of 15-20 minute presentations on specific projects. Each of them was an interesting take on the idea of linking data together with marked-up text or image files. Here’s a list of them to peruse:

CATMA, Marco Petris (www.catma.de)
CollateX, Ronald Dekker (collatex.sourceforge.net)
TextGrid, Ubbo Ventjeer & Yahya Al-Hajj (http://www.textgrid.de/en.html)
DigiLib, Robert Casties (http://digilib.berlios.de/)
TILE, Dave Lester & Grant Dickie
OpenAnnotation, Grant Dickie, Marco Petris & Moritz Wissenbach
xMod (https://bitbucket.org/jmvieira), Miguel Vieira
SADE, Alexander Czmiel (Currently under development, but here’s a link to his institution, the IDE: www.i-d-e.de)
MOM-CA, Jochen Graf (http://www.mom-wiki.uni-koeln.de/MOM-CA2/Metadata)

The result of these presentations was an agreement that the Digital Humanities has a similar need across institutions for SVG annotations, exporting and importing TEI data and annotation data, and automatically linking lines and text together in a seamless fashion. Obviously, there is no one interface currently available (nor will there ever be, in my opinion) that can manage all of this, so the idea of arguing over what platform to incorporate our efforts in was found useless. Instead, we were encouraged to split up the workshop into sub-groups that focused on development and institutional planning goals that fit with what we wanted out of the event.

As with the presentations, there was too much information, engaging arguments, and fascinating ideas brought up in these sub-sessions to report it all in a single blog posting. What I can write about is the proceedings of the two sessions I was involved in: the Text and Image Linking group and the Annotation Framework sub-group.

“Text and Image Linking” started off with a more in-depth description of the TILE project and what it does. Moritz Wissenbach then expanded on how he took the code from TILE and implemented it into his own project, Faust Edition, thus creating a quasi-interoperable connection between the projects. From there, we argued that small collaborations such as this can build a kind of network of data between projects that works around institutional and project boundaries. Robert Casties of DigiLib asked some very interesting questions, such as why we chose TILE as a framework and how or if our collective data could support the massive amount of metadata his users require. Marco Petris of the CATMA project in Hamburg had similar concerns for such a collaboration: What if collaborating means making an unspoken contract and forces a specific agenda on a project otherwise adverse to the ideas of something like TILE? Are we simply fitting a square peg into a round hole, to use a (poor) allegory? How do these smaller connections effect the global Digital Humanities community? In order to continue these conversations and (hopefully) reach some kind of consensus or possible white paper, Ulrike Henny from Cologne established the Text and Image Linking e-mail list: textimagelinking at uni-koeln dot de.

“Annotation Frameworks” had a very similar subset of participants which carried over from the Text and Image Linking subgroup. As a representative of MITH, I spoke to our work on collaborating with the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) to develop an open-source and extensible framework for annotations. This, we believe, would allow for other users and programmers to take our saved annotations and use them in their own work, since the OAC specifications are so flexible and open. Robert Casties continued his argument about how a universal model for data exchange as proposed at the Darmstadt Bootcamp for Interedition and OAC would not fully realize some goals for metadata. Moritz and my argument was that it could encompass everything a researcher may need, pending we as programmers remain transparent about our code and our research. Again, the final conclusion was that we needed to clarify and continue our arguments online and through e-mail.

This conclusion was shared by many of the sub-groups who all presented brief, 5 minute overviews of their findings. Central to a lot of the arguments were how we are all similar in goals, yet very different in use cases, funding, and programming time. What we really need, as the “DH Community Planning” sub-group reported, is a common outlet for collaborating and exchanging ideas outside of the workshop. Joris Van Zundert made an eloquent defense for sticking with a path of collaboration and working around institutional boundaries. This led to much discussion on the issue of “What to do next”. Dave Lester now plans to head up an initiative to get Interedition Bootcamps split between the United States and Europe (I’ll let him explain that more). Several institution partners vowed to use the Stanford University e-mail list for DH community planners. On the development side, we all promised to work hard on our own, off-work time to develop prototypes and working proof-of-concepts of interoperable tools in order to get more funding for projects such as Interedition.

For my MITH development time, this conference has led to several engaging opportunities. TextGridLab, a software framework created at the Goettingen University in Germany, has interest in connecting their own image and text linking tool to TILE’s. It is possible that this collaboration could serve as a working example of the kind of outcome we want from the Text and Image Linking group. Several of us also have interest in taking a closer look at an Automatic Line Recognition system used by developers Daniel Hochstrasser and Tobias Rindlisbacher of Zurich. As for the Image Linking e-mail list, I’ve already contributed my own thoughts there and Robert Sanderson of OAC and the Shared Canvas project have gotten more users engaged in talking through that medium. I and MITH are very excited at the connections made and look forward to future collaborative conferences such as this one. It only goes to show that it only takes a relatively small effort to create interesting and powerful tools for the DH community.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared at Grant Dickie’s blog on January 4, 2012.

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Interedition Bootcamp Wuerzburg: Day 5

Grant Dickie — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 22:39:43 +0000

At the University of Wuerzburg Seminar building, the same place that the TEI Conference Workshops are occurring, the Interedition group is hard at work finishing up prototypes and proofs of concept for our individual projects. Today is the last day for the Bootcamp, although a lot of the members are talking about continuing to hack tomorrow, since the seminar room we reserved remains reserved tomorrow. Some of the group are particularly tired, as there was a late-night hacking session until 1:30am for the third night in a row. To say these people are committed is only putting it lightly.

However tired we might be, the effort has paid off. Nick Laiacona has published his work on an SVG text editing application called HumEdit (Github is here). Patrick Cuba (TPEN project) and Bram Buitendijk (eLaborate) have done a lot of additional work on top of Nick’s HumEdit application, building wrappers and a fancy user interface. The tools uses sample annotation data from Gregor Middel (Faust Edition) and draws overlapping hierarchies of annotations on text. The letters, words, and sentences are compiled individually through SVG on an HTML canvas, and the annotation data is color-coded and layered as underlining shapes that can be dragged. Changing text and dragging annotation markers affects metadata on a remote server storing the annotations. Clearly, this is a very exciting project.

The Annotation team on which I am on has been no less ambitious. Asaf Bartov has been querying and testing the service implemented by Moritz Wissenbach and Marcos Petris that serves up OAC annotation constraint URLs. The intention for this service is to create valid OAC constraint expressions, as outlined in the OAC Beta Specifications (www.openannotation.org). I myself have been developing a working prototype for a user interface that registers OAC annotations using the services coded by the team (See last post). For those of you who enjoy UML charts, Asaf has made one describing the interaction between OAC server, validation services, and the client-side application (which I’m still working on):

A not very well documented group in these blog posts has been Tara Andrews, Joris Van Zundert, and Troy Griffitts working on developing interoperable microservices through Open Social. Tara and Joris have programmed several Humanities tools together and were able, over the Interedition Bootcamp, to fuse them together through the use of Open Social. Troy was able to provide expert consultation on the subject, since he is currently on contract with the University of Muenster Institute for New Testament Text Studies (INTF) to assist in developing Open Social Humanities gadgets. So far, the Open Social team at Interedition have been able to publish something online that resembles an interoperable suite of Digital Humanities tools: http://interedition-tools.appspot.com/ . Very cool.

Doug Reside joined us to assist with coding and has made an encampment over with the people working on HumEdit. Doug is here for the TEI Members Conference and promises to start some serious discussions on the future of TEI at the conference. Professor Fotis Jannidis (Faust Edition), one of the organizers for the TEI conference and member of the Interedition board, also joined us to see about our progress on various projects. Also at the conference tomorrow will be a Think Tank on the ideas of interoperability as defined by Interedition. I myself plan to attend one of the workshops offered by the TEI conference, a “Introduction to TextGridLab” that looks to be very thorough.

Today in pictures, I have what I think may be the best shot of the the Maine Castle, or Marineberg, as it is called in German. This was shot from the Mainebruecke, or Maine Bridge, which is one of the oldest bridges in the city that crosses the Maine river.

Castle on the Maine River, Wuerzburg

– Grant

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Interedition Bootcamp Wuerzburg: Day 3 & 4

Grant Dickie — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:43:09 +0000

The past two days have been a flurry of coding, sometimes even going on to 1-2 in the morning. This group is highly enthusiastic about making progress in their individual groups. This energy has been pretty contagious and I’ve had less time for blogging. Regardless, here’s some reports from the Interedition Bootcamp weekend:

Saturday night at dinner, there was a great conversation between myself and Gregor Middell about Interedition and how it differs from the normal day to day of Humanities centers. Gregor’s opinion is that Interedition, as well as similar Bootcamps or ‘hackathons’, provide a space for DH developers to freely express ideas and experiment with their projects. Gregor’s thought was that outside of bootcamps, a top-down model is used to organize outcomes of a project and limit massive scope creep and expenditures. This can feel limiting to the types of humanities researchers and hackers that come to events like Interedition and just want to try different methods to gain results. Joris van Zundert, Gregor, and the other Interedition organizers hope that their own bootcamp tradition can continue for these reasons.

This kind of attitude, I added, has implications for centers such as MITH. Originally, MITH was suggested to participate in Interedition due to our work in the Text and Image Linking Environment project, as well as other projects where we worked with annotation, such as the Shakespeare Quartos Archive. MITH has since grown and expanded in its interests, as well as the centers from which the other participants hail from. It’s good that Interedition enthuses this kind of growth by offering a place to freely experiment and hack on ideas and challenges.

For OAC, we’ve ended up doing a lot of interesting experimentation. Asaf Bartov has created a Ruby on Rails server to act as a repository for OAC-spec-friendly annotations (Github is here, and a temporary online service is here). Marcos Petris (CATMA) and Moritz Wissenbach (Faust Edition) are developing a service for producing constraint URIs for OAC annotations (Github is here, plus they have a temporary installation online here). Cesar Ruiz and Jaoquin Gayoso Cabada from the University of Madrid have developed a wrapper application to interact with Asaf’s online repository (Github is here). I myself am working on a wrapper to register annotations with Asaf’s server using the recently developed MITHGrid library (Github is here). We’re having some issues with jQuery ajax calls going to his server, so it’s still under development – keep watching the commits on Github.

Wendell Piez has joined the group and is offering his help to the text editor hack group, which has made a lot of progress. They now have a text editor running with an HTML5 canvas that draws text, while also drawing underlying, color-coded annotation layers. It’s a fascinating project and it’s drawing a lot of attention of the group.

Tomorrow will be a round-up of everyone’s progress, so I’ll be looking forward to hearing from all of the groups and their exciting projects!

I’ll leave you with some pictures from last night, where we had dinner at the Old Mill restaurant – a staple of the Wuerzburg scene. Locals like to get their local wine here and sit on the nearby bridge during the day. At night, they offer some of the best food in town, as well as the best of the local wine. I hate to say it, but it’s going to be hard for Maryland to top this kind of attraction.

Some locals enjoying wine on the Marienbruecke (Marien Bridge)

Heading to the Castle Before Dinner

And we found that it was well worth the climb

A (blurry) shot of the group eating at the “Old Mill” — one of Wuerzburgs institutions

Auf Wiedersehen,

Grant

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Interedition Bootcamp Wuerzburg: Day 2 (Cont’d)

Grant Dickie — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 09:12:48 +0000

After several hours of hacking away, we’ve decided to head out for food and drinks. I have to say it is an experience to stay in a fancy hotel lounge and see the looks of hotel guests as they pass by the table of DH hackers and their laptops. There was much progress made by both sides of the table at the bootcamp. Nick Laiacona has implemented an HTML canvas to mimic typing text on the screen and is still working away at it. So far on the Annotation side, we’re 60% complete with developing the back end RESTful service for registering and querying OAC-spec annotations. Two of the Annotation members from the University of Madrid started implementing the front end wrapper using the GWT library, while I’m using MITHGrid to do the same. Whatever the outcome, I think this experimental work can benefit a lot of the OAC annotation work we’re doing back at MITH.

Tomorrow we’re planning an outing to the Residenz, a local palace, wine cellar, and botanical garden. Many more pictures to follow!

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Interedition Bootcamp Wuerzburg: Day 2

Grant Dickie — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 10:26:50 +0000

Our Bootcamp is continuing into its second day.

This morning we broke up into two main hacker groups: those interested in Annotation tools and those interested in creating a (better) text editing tools. Due to my work with OAC, I’m in the Annotation group discussing ideas about an annotation tool. I’ve started hacking up some code using MITHGrid to create a front-end application that will work with storing OAC-specification-friendly annotations to an online microservice. Our service that we’re making in this group has a lot of the same goals as things like Zotero, but in this case we want to experiment more and come up with solutions to specific problems such as how to store and display multiple annotation bodies for one target, and what issues need to be addressed for a user interface that does this. There are some great people in my group, among them Mortiz Wissenbach, Marco Petris, and Asaf Bartov from Wikimedia.

I’ll be making updates regularly, but you can check out my code that I’m writing on my Github: http://github.com/jdickie.

The other main group is focusing on developing ideas and apps for creating a new text editor for editing marked up documents. Their main issue is in displaying overlapping annotations and updating them while the marked up document is being edited (e.g. shifting annotation positions when new text is added, but retaining the overall meaning of the annotation). Gregor Middell from the Faust Edition project and Nick Laiaconafrom NINES are among those working on this, so I’m certain there’ll be something great coming out of that group.

Forgot to mention yesterday that you can follow the live notes of Interedition Bootcamp Wuerzburg here: http://interedition.eu/wiki/index.php/W%C3%BCrzburg2011/Live_Minutes

– Grant

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Interedition Bootcamp: Day 1

Grant Dickie — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 20:35:46 +0000

After a long but pleasant flight, a shorter but even more pleasant train ride, and a scenic bus ride from the train station, I am finally at the University of Wuerzburg at the Interedition conference. It’s exciting to be here with so many other professionals from annotation and linking projects.

Interedition was originally set up to get domain experts for text analysis tools together and ask them how to make their tools interoperable. A by-product of this action was a creation of a Java suite called CollateX. However, this is not the only reason for the conference. It is founded on the desire to create common goals and networks between DH programmers.

This Bootcamp will last from Friday, October 7th to Tuesday, October 11th. It has a lot of the same people who were present from the last Bootcamp in March, which I attended, plus some new faces. To see what happened in the previous Bootcamps, check out the Interedition wiki: http://www.interedition.eu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Joris Van Zundert, the head organizer for Interedition, had the same train as me, so we were able to have a great discussion on the train about the Interedition conference. Joris feels that so long as we come out of the conference with a clear understanding on how to make the various tools collaborators bring interoperable, the weekend will be successful. We’ll see if that goal is met or exceeded.

What this Bootcamp has done well so far is provide a lot of examples of interesting projects that involve markup and text. The following is a list of the presentations, where I’ve tried my best to write down what each person is doing and their University/research affiliation. Honestly, there is so much here that I’m just trying to keep up!

University of Madrid – A project is focusing on developing an open collaborative annotator for Google Books. The developers have ambitions to utilize the Hathi Trust into their reader. This opened up a discussion on how to gain access to these large libraries, e.g. working around the Hathi API, dealing with Google Books licenses, etc.

Gregor Middell (middell.net) – Faust Edition project: creation of a large metadata and self-transcription tool library. This tool uses the CKEditor to create linkages between authority files in their Library’s database and marked up transcriptions of documents.

Typewrite: Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online – taking low-quality OCR scans and improving their quality. This is done through an interface that automatically outlines OCR regions gleaned from their TEI-A documents that describe the OCR and displays the output text from the OCR. Users can then edit the output text to correct machine errors, thus making a good crowd-sourcing application for transcription and OCR. Those who complete correcting a transcription receive as their reward a copy of that transcription from the repository. Having users contribute corrections also allows for a live feedback of common errors and bugs from the OCR process.

TextLab: Melville Electronic Library – a tool that produces XML markup that displays sequences of editorial decisions within a manuscript. This is done through a user interface that displays the image of the manuscript

Elaborate – Hyugens Institute – http://www.e-laborate.nl/en/ which is similar to the TILE project I worked on, where annotations are made on text transcriptions. Users have the option to attach metadata and annotations to the text they transcribe. They then publish the data to a XML database, which is then exported to other formats.

CATMA: University of Hamburg http://www.catma.de – a large desktop-based application written in Java that allows for easy markup of text using color-coded highlighters. This creates an overlapping hierarchy of annotations within a text. These annotations are stored in memory and can then later be queried against and used in word searches of the marked-up text. This allows for some beautiful graphs and charts of statistical analysis within any text. What’s coolest to me about this tool is that it allows for overlapping of annotations within a text and yet keeps the output XML (mostly) TEI-compliant.

University of Muenster – building tools to help scholars look through a large paper-based database of witnesses of the New Testament of the Bible. This includes incorporating demographic metadata into text and images. They also set as their goals transcription and indexing of the text. They are currently prototyping using OpenSocial applications to publish images and annotations through pubsub. Honestly, this looks to be the most promising

University of Saint Louis, TPEN project – Developed an interface for paleographical documents that supports collaborative tagging and transcribing of manuscript images. This also shares a lot of the same philosophy in exporting XML and technical features as TILE.

What has emerged thus far as a common definition of interoperability is the ability to visually set up tools next to one another. It also means creating chains of tools that take over the simple, individual tasks associated with OCR, text mining, transcription, and annotation and make them more accessible and standardized. Whatever I said during my presentation has created a spark and there will definitely be a workshop/group focused on the OAC specs and common pathways forward with using that model for interoperability.

I think that’s enough for one blog post – stay tuned for updates and, eventually, pictures…

Grant

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