Semantically Rich Tools for Text Exploration

FAIN: HD-50822-09

Brown University (Providence, RI 02912-9100)
Andrew Ashton (Project Director: April 2009 to August 2012)

Creation of a suite of software tools designed to allow humanists to analyze large collections or archives of TEI encoded texts in the new Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR).

Literary scholarship is poised to benefit immensely from the emerging modular software frameworks that support deep and finely grained investigations of digital texts. Humanities research centers, such as the Brown University Women Writers Project, have invested substantially in enriching bodies of literary texts with semantic and structural information, using XML formats such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Recent innovations in scholarly software design offer opportunities to exploit the semantic depth of TEI collections by creating new tools for textual analysis and collaboration. To this end, the Brown University Scholarly Technology Group (STG) and the Brown University Women Writers Project (WWP) propose a new effort to create a prototype suite of software tools to explore TEI encoded texts in the new Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR).

Associated Products

TEI components for SEASR (Computer Program)
Title: TEI components for SEASR
Author: Andrew Ashton
Author: Michael Della Bitta
Abstract: The ability to reuse tools across projects is an increasingly important feature of many digital humanities efforts. Researchers using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines have traditionally published to the web using processes such as XSLT transformations, which are intended to reproduce a work as an enhanced digital surrogate using HTML, PDF, or another publication format. Processes such as these often contain the complete pipeline of logic that produces a publishable product, whether the product is a document, a data set, or visualizations. Other approaches to scholarly software design offer opportunities to enhance the reusability of scholarly software tools by breaking apart these processing pipelines into smaller, more general-purpose chunks and providing an environment to blend and align tools from different domains. To test this approach, the Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) and the Brown University Women Writers Project (WWP) have developed a prototype suite of software tools to explore TEI encoded texts in the Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR).
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://repository.library.brown.edu:8080/fedora/objects/bdr:11456/datastreams/ZIP/content
Primary URL Description: TEI components in the Brown Digital Repository
Secondary URL: https://github.com/Brown-University-Library/TEI-Components-for-SEASR
Secondary URL Description: TEI components in GitHub
Access Model: Open source
Programming Language/Platform: Java
Source Available?: Yes

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