MITH is delighted to announce we have received a Digital Humanities Start-Up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’s Digital Humanities Initiative. The $30,000 award will support development of a tool called the Ajax XML Encoder (AXE) by Assistant Director DOUG RESIDE and a team. Work will begin in September.
“The Ajax XML encoder, with its intuitive Web-based interface, will come as a breath of fresh air to those who have previously been frustrated by text-centric tagging tools which require an expert knowledge of mark-up languages,” said Reside. Since the codification of the Text Encoding Initiative standards in the mid-1990s, the process of the creation of digital editions and archives is largely one of “marking up” existing artifacts in SGML or XML. Originally, this was often done “by hand,” with scholars adding XML tags to existing text documents using a text editor. Over the last decade several tools have been produced that make this process somewhat more efficient and accurate, though most still require more than a beginner’s familiarity with XML encoding, and few are open source. Moreover, many digital humanities projects have, of late, become far more multi-medial–relying on image, video, and audio files as well as text. Existing markup tools have only begun to work with these non-textual artifacts. As digital archives continue to grow, the markup tools used to encode them must become more flexible and easier to use.
The Ajax XML Encoder (AXE) is intended to meet this need for a flexible, open source, multimedia tagging tool suitable for use by the non-specialist. MITH Director, Neil Fraistat, noted that “AXE will allow users with limited technical skills to tag text, images, video, and audio files deeply for inclusion in digital archives.” Like the mythological Ajax’s axe, MITH’s AXE is intended to provide users with enough power and flexibility to accomplish their tasks without a great deal of assistance from the technical “gods.”