Applied Research in Patacriticism is the tools development group working with the NINES project group. ARP is designing and building a set of key software applications for use by humanities scholars and educators in their research and teaching. These tools are Collex, Juxta, and IVANHOE.

Collex is an open-source collections - and exhibits-builder to aid humanities scholars doing research in digital collections or within federated research environments like NINES. Collex operates under the assumption that the best paths through a complex digital resource are those forged by use and interpretation. A Collex approach works to assist scholars in recording, sharing, and building on the interpretive purposes to which they put their online teaching and research environments. Collex leverages current developments in folksonomy and semantic-web technology to perform data mining operations and enhance knowledge discovery, leading scholars and students to see connections among digital objects, based on the contexts into which those objects have been placed (implicitly or explicitly) by past scholarly activity in the system. Users of Collex in NINES can: collect, tag, analyze, and annotate trusted objects (digital texts and images vetted for scholarly integrity); reorganize and publish objects in fresh critical perspectives; share these new collections with students and colleagues, in a variety of output formats; and, without any special technical training, produce interlinked online and print exhibits using a set of professional design templates. A detailed description of Collex is available here.

Juxta is a cross-platform tool for collating and analyzing any kind or number of textual objects. The tool can set any textual witness as the base text and can filter white space and/or punctuation. It has several kinds of visualizations, including a heat map of textual differences and a histogram that can expose the filtering results. When collations are being executed, Juxta keeps the textual transcriptions keyed to any digital images that may stand behind the transcriptions as their documentary base. Juxta also allows the collations and analyses to be annotated and saved for further use. Juxta can be downloaded here.

IVANHOE is an online playspace for multiple readers interested in exploring how acts of interpretation get made and reflecting on what those acts mean or might mean. The explorations come as active interventions in the textual field that is the target of the readers interests. These interventions are then returned to the players in various kinds of visual transformations that players can use for critical reflection on the interpretative process. These reflections come as computerized transformations of the discourse field into visualizations that expose interpretive relationships and possibilities. The visualizations are mapped to three interrelated coordinates: the players acting in the field; the moves executed by the players (comprising sets of multiple actions); and the documents that are acted upon. IVANHOE creates a formalized digital space where these three coordinates dynamically interact. The interactions generate a complex interpretive space whose possibilities of meaning are returned to the interpretive agents in visualizations designed to provoke critical reflection and re-exploration. For further information see The ARP Ivanhoe site. Additionally, you can experiment with our live demo.

(Visit the SpecLab site for the Ivanhoe Game or read a software specification for Ivanhoe navigation. A special issue of Text Technology describes IVANHOE in depth.)

a networked infrastructure for nineteenth-century electronic scholarship