Projects:

Collex

Collex is a set of tools designed to aid students and scholars working in networked archives and federated repositories of humanities materials: a sophisticated COLLections and EXhibits mechanism for the semantic web.

Collex allows users to collect, annotate, and tag online objects and to repurpose them in illustrated, interlinked essays or exhibits. It functions within any modern web browser without recourse to plugins or downloads and is fully networked as a server-side application. By saving information about user activity (the construction of annotated collections and exhibits) as "remixable" metadata, the Collex system writes current practice into the scholarly record and permits knowledge discovery based not only on the characteristics or "facets" of digital objects, but also on the contexts in which they are placed by a community of scholars.

Collex builds on semantic web technologies and brings folksonomy tagging to trusted, peer-reviewed scholarly archives. Its exhibits-builder is analogous to high-end digital curation tools currently affordable only to large (offline) museums and galleries. Collex is free, generalizable, and open source and is presently being implemented in a large-scale pilot project under the auspices of NINES.

NINES

NINES stands for a Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship, a scholarly organization in British and American nineteenth-century studies supported by a software development group assembling a suite of critical and editorial tools for digital scholarship.

In NINES you can:

• search and browse more than 60,000 peer-reviewed texts and images in 19th-century studies
• build your own collections of documents, articles, images, and ephemera;
• organize, add keywords, and annotate your work;
• discover lines of critical inquiry related to your own;
• and (coming soon!) create syllabi, annotated bibliographies, illustrated essays, and timelines.

NINES is powered by Collex, a free, open-source tool designed for scholars.

IVANHOE

IVANHOE began in a critical exchange at SpecLab about a shared dissatisfaction with the limitations inherent in received forms of interpretation and critical method. We wanted to develop and encourage more imaginative forms of critical procedure, forms closer in spirit and method -- and rigor -- to original works of art, poetry, and literature.

Conceived as a ludic game- or play-space, IVANHOE 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.

Attention! The IVANHOE acronym contest has concluded. (Prizes. Glory.)

Juxta

Juxta is an open-source cross-platform tool for comparing and collating multiple witnesses to a single textual work. The software allows users to set any of the witnesses as the base text, to add or remove witness texts, to switch the base text at will, and to annotate Juxta-revealed comparisons and save the results. Juxta comes with several kinds of analytic visualizations. The primary collation gives a split frame comparison of a base text with a witness text, along with a display of the digital images from which the base text is derived. Juxta displays a heat map of all textual variants and allows the user to locate — at the level of any textual unit — all witness variations from the base text. A histogram of Juxta collations is particularly useful for long documents. This visualization displays the density of all variation from the base text and serves as a useful finding aid for specific variants. Juxta can also output a lemmatized schedule (in HTML format) of the textual variants in any set of comparisons./p>

Rossetti Archive (re)Design

If 'pataphysics is a science of imaginary solutions, the Rossetti Archive has heretofore too assiduously resolved some sciences of the imagination. Our present work at reconfiguring and extending its interface is fact an exposé: we want to lift the Archive's skirts. Behold! a modeling machine disguised as a text and image repository.