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Archive for the ‘software’ Category

Collecting NINES results in Zotero

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

The most recent update to Collex includes a new feature that serves up Zotero-friendly metadata for all of NINES objects in search results, tag lists and Publication groups. This is the first in a series of development tasks in which we hope to better integrate NINES with the superb Firefox plug-in created by the Center for History and New Media that facilitates collecting and sharing objects all across the web.

If you are a Firefox user and you’ve installed Zotero as a plug-in, a little folder icon will appear in the URL bar of your browser whenever you are on a page with collect-able objects. Simply click the folder and choose which objects you’d like to save to your Zotero library. In the not-too-distant future, we plan to allow you to sync your NINES objects with your Zotero objects, making Exhibit Building with external links much simpler.

Posted by Dana Wheeles in collex, development, open source, resources, software | 1 Comment »

Juxta receives Google Digital Humanities Award

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Good news!  Google has offered its support to help us develop Juxta into a web application:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-commitment-to-digital-humanities.html

We are thrilled to have received this competitive award, and look forward to working to optimize Juxta for the web.

Here is an abstract of our application for the Google Award:

With the support of a Google Digital Humanities Research Award, we propose to transform Juxta into a web-based application integrated with Google Books. Scholars could use such a tool to track changes in language over time and to test literary and historical theories through comparative analysis of texts.

As the largest single part of the general remediation of the global library to digital formats, the 12,000,000+ books digitized by Google represent a major opportunity for scholars interested in the history of texts and editions. We want to know how Charles Dickens and Henry James changed their novels as they went through different editions in their lifetimes; and we also want to see the changes introduced by later editors, in later printings.  We want to collate versions of poems published by Sylvia Plath and Walt Whitman to discover their revisions.  We want to compare digital texts of uncertain origin with known versions, as a mode of authentication.

[Read the whole article over at the Juxta blog.]

Posted by Dana Wheeles in development, digital humanities, juxta, open source, software | 1 Comment »

Introducing DAVILA

Monday, April 19th, 2010

[Jean Bauer is an advanced graduate student in UVA's Corcoran Department of History and a NINES Graduate Fellow for 2009-2010]

I have just released my first open source project. HUZZAH!

DAVILA is a database schema visualization/annotation tool that creates “humanist readable” technical diagrams. It is written in Processing with the toxiclibs physics library and released under GPLv3. DAVILA takes in the database’s schema and a pipe separated customization file and uses them to produce an interactive, color-coded, annotated diagram similar in format to UML. There are many applications that will create technical diagrams based on database schema, but as a digital humanist I require more than they can provide.

Technical diagrams are wonderfully compact ways of conveying information about extremely complex systems. But they only work for people who have been trained to read them. If you design a database for a historian, and then hand him or her a basic E-R or UML diagram, you will end up explaining the diagram’s nomenclature before you can talk about the database (and oftentimes you run out of time before getting back to the research question underlying the database). This removes the major advantage of technical diagrams and can also create an unnecessary divide between the technical and non-technical members of a digital humanities development team.

I have become fascinated by how documenting a project (either in development or after release) can build community. I’m not just talking about user generated documentation (ala wikis), but rather the feeling created by a diagram or README file that really takes the time to explain how the software works and why it works the way it does. There is a generosity and even warmth that comes from thoughtful, helpful documentation, just as inadequate documentation can make someone feel stupid, slighted, or unwanted as a user/developer. I will be writing on this topic more in the months to come (perhaps leading up to an article). In the meantime, check out DAVILA and let me know what you think.

Project homepage: http://www.jeanbauer.com/davila.html

Posted by jeanbauer in digital humanities, open source, software | No Comments »

COST Action 32: Open Scholarly Communities on the Web

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Launched in April of 2006, the COST (Co-operation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) Action 32 is an initiative dedicated to creating a research infrastructure for humanities scholarship on the Web. Meant to foster international cooperation between projects and communities already pursuing digital humanities scholarship, this group facilitates collaborations among scholars and allows for healthy debates about the best practices for scholarly editing and publishing online. Its members represent some of the most innovative and impressive work emerging in Europe, including Discovery Project partner sites  HyperNietzsche (edited by Paolo d’Iorio and soon to be NietzscheSource), HyperWittgenstein (soon to be WittgensteinSource, edited by Alois Pichler), and SchopenhauerSource (presented by Matteo V. d’Alfonso) among many others.

Late in 2008 NINES was invited to join COST Action 32, first and foremost to continue the development of our textual collation tool, Juxta, as a web service adaptable to other online frameworks like Talia. Associate Director Laura Mandell (Miami University, Ohio), Developer Nick Laiacaona (Performant Software) and I traveled to Göteborg, Sweden last week to attend the most recent meeting of the group, and to share our own institutional goals with European scholars. Our presentation (and the ever unpredictable live demo) was well received, and I hope to see a number of new sites passing through the NINES peer review process in the near future.

More news about Juxta for the web and other transatlantic development projects will be posted in the coming weeks.

Posted by Dana Wheeles in collex, digital humanities, events, features, juxta, press, scholarly projects, software | No Comments »

All in one place

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

We’ve added the Juxta, Ivanhoe and Collex feeds to the NINES blog so that you can get all your updates in one place. The links for each of these posts will take you the the project’s individual blog, where you can find out more about downloading and using the software.

Posted by Dana Wheeles in software | No Comments »