Research Tools: Resources for Humanities Computing

There is a constant flow of new tools for digital scholarly work, from software companies, research groups, open source consortiums, and individual developers. Humanities computing relies on a wide variety of tools that take advantage of innovative technologies in all the areas of humanities research. IATH uses a combination of proprietary and open source tools, some of which are designed and built by our Fellows and their project staff. Some of these tools are described here, along with links to other tools of particular interest to humanities computing.

Applied Research in Patacriticism

Jerome McGann: NINES

• Collex - Collex will allow users of digital resources to assemble and share virtual "collections" and to present annotated "exhibits" and re-arrangements of online materials. These critical rearrangements can of course bring together materials that are variously diverse — materially, formally, historically. First slated for testing on the Rossetti Archive, Collex rearrangements will be undertaken by the Archive's general editor and by a few invited literary scholars and art historians, who will act as guest critics and curators, offering radically different perspectives on Rossetti and his circle, all based on the same corpus of digital files. Later, individual users will be able to assemble and comment on Archive materials in private collection spaces, choose whether to make those assemblages available to others, and then build and share annotated exhibits based on their own virtual collections or on existing, user-created work.
• IVANHOE - IVANHOE began in a critical exchange between myself (Jerome McGann) and Johanna Drucker and our shared dissatisfaction with the limitations inherent in received forms of interpretation and critical method. This is a playspace for collaborative interpretational work. The playspace promotes such activity, on one hand, and on the other provides different kinds of visualizations for studying and reflecting on the activity. It consists of interventions, changes, additions, and commentaries in the discourse field of an imaginative work. The emphasis is on making explicit the assumptions about critical practice, textual interpretation, and reading (in the most fundamental sense) that remain unacknowledged, or at least irregularly explored, in a conventional approach to literary studies.
• Juxta - Juxta is a text comparison and collation tool for XML files and the image files that stand behind the XML transcriptions. It allows a scholar to locate for comparison equivalent textual passages, to display both the equivalent image files as well as the transcriptions. It also allows comparisons between comparable pictorial objects (e.g., versions of The Blessed Damozel) or comparable textual and pictorial objects (e.g, illustrations of passages in Bleak House). All such comparisons can also be annotated. The tool will also collate equivalent textual strings (both marked and unmarked) and output a schedule of the differences.

Technologies Used by the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library

David Germano: THDL Technologies

Digital libraries such as THDL are only possible through recent developments in computer technology. These new technologies provide the infrastructure and mechanisms necessary for an interactive repository of scholarly knowledge that has no corresponding analog in traditional libraries of printed material. Not only do such technologies allow for immediate interaction between the scholar and the collections of data, but they also permit collaboration between scholars separated by vast distances. While the casual user interacts with THDL through the standard HTML web-pages, the active collaborator who is creating resources within THDL will find it helpful to understand the Library's architecture in order to make the best use of the available tools for building collections and resources. The interested observer might also wish to know how a digital library actually works for their own reasons. The technologies section of the THDL toolbox provides such information.

Books

• Augmenting Comprehension: Digital Tools and the History of Ideas Dino Buzzetti, Giuliano Pancaldi & Harold Short, Eds., August 2004.

Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities

September 28-30, 2005
University of Virginia

Summit Objective: Digital tools and the underlying cyberinfrastructure expand the opportunities for humanistic scholarship and education. They enable new and innovative approaches to humanistic scholarship. They provide scholars and students deeper and more sophisticated access to cultural materials, thus changing how material can be taught and experienced. They facilitate new forms of collaboration of all those who touch the digital representation of the human record.

For more information See "Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities". Or download summit announcement [Word Doc] | [PDF]