A huge step forward: After five years of development, TextGrid 1.0 has been released and is available for download and work.

Our summer 2011 newsletter focusses on the TextGrid 1.0 release as well as the Digital Humanities ceremony in Göttingen (July 12th/13th, 2011).

Content:

• TextGrid v1.0
• Report on the Digital Humanities Ceremony, Göttingen, 12/07/2011
• Reports from workshops and training sessions held at the Digital Humanities ceremony, 13/07/2011
  • The Digital Library on TextGrid
    
  • Sustainability of Virtual Research Environments
  • Text Mining, Controlled Vocabularies and Linked Data
  • Training sessions: TextGrid basics and editors
• Upcoming events
• New publications and reports
• Related activities

Fotis Jannidis and Katrin Betz (both from Würzburg University) presented the online library zeno.org, which was recently purchased by TextGrid, and presented a survey on the procedures neccessary for the formatting and processing of its data sets. Metadata as well as research-related user scenarios were major subjects of the presentation, adressing the tools scholars can use to access data within TextGridLab and how this data can be processed further.

The digital library accessible in TextGrid contains a comprehensive collection of texts from the early printing age to the early 20th century in digital form. TextGrid does not only display these texts for reading, but mainly also for further processing within editions and corpora. To this end, during the project's duration, XML data files are being converted into a valid TEI format, allowing advanced in-depth search.

As of today, numerous texts from a total of almost 700 authors of the complete digital library's fictional text set are accessible and available in a TEI-coded format for download on TextGrid. Further marked-up text sets from sociology, history, philosophy, sciences and music, as well as reference books (dictionaries) will follow.

Further information on the various text sets and on open access licensing here.

The workshop on “Sustainability of Virtual Research Environments” on July 13^th, 2011 which was held during the Digital Humanities ceremony in Göttingen set the framework for a discussion on the intensified use of digital media in research. This transition has been prompted by the growing interconnectedness of research resources, which is setting the stage for the reliable operation of digital research infrastructures for the arts and humanities.

The lively discussion amongst a variety of representatives from research, computing centres, and sponsors and facilitated by Prof. Dr. Axel Horstmann were well received. Prof. Dr. Uwe Schwiegelshohn (Universität Dortmund), representing D-Grid GmbH, outlined elementary requirements for a Virtual Research Environment; Frank Dickmann (Universitätsmedizin Göttingen) indicated, for the WissGrid project,  the necessity for changes in the current federal funding structure in the face of transregional networks in today’s research communities. With already several years of experience in operating Virtual Research Environments at Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ), Dr Michael Lautenschlager presented central challenges in the handling of mass data on political as well as socially sensitive issues. Dr. Andreas Witt (Institut für Deutsche Sprache) developed, from a TextGrid perspective, crucial benchmarks for various cost scenarios for a sustainable research infrastructure, considering technical, organisational and staff-related criteria and, in three scenarios, covering various grades of a lasting structure.

In addition to the speakers, the subsequent panel debate was made up by several experts in the field of eSciences: Prof. Dr. Norbert Lossau (SUB Göttingen), Prof. Dr. Otto Rienhoff (UMG) and Dr. Frank Sander (Max Planck Digital Library) and was facilitated by Prof. Dr. Axel Horstmann. Essential challenges and opportunities for sustainable operation of Virtual Research Environments were discussed, and possible solutions for a both organisational and financial sustainability were highlighted. In this context, the acceptance of benefits and chances for potential users was highlighted as a core issue: A preferably broad user basis  as well as a steadily growing demand of Virtual Research Environments offer the safest guarantee for a lasting funding of such a project. Operators of Virtual Research Environments are therefore encouraged to educate their users by offering them clear performance profiles and visible evidence for their benefits when compared to conventional research methods; moreover, they are advised to communicate these advantages to young academics through updated academic curricula. Strong institutional partners, flexible federal funding politics of the german federation and states, as well as a user-oriented alignment of computing centres are complementing the foundation of any Virtual Research Environment.

Numerous participants and vital discussions reiterated the importance that both politics and research are attaching to the topic; TextGrid is therefore positive about having caught the spirit of the age with this workshop, and, with its approach to date, of being on the right track towards the lasting establishment of digital methods in the arts and humanities.  

This workshop offered a summary of ongoing activities related to the workshop topics within the TextGrid environment as well as presenting current ideas and strategies to a larger audience and discussion. 

TEXTvre, a project related to TextGrid, embeds TextGrid as a Virtual Research Environment at King's College, London, adjusting it to local users' requirements and integrating the TextGrid repository into the local infrastructure. This was the subject of Mark Hedges' and José Miguel Vieira's (King's College London) presentation TEXTvre: Implementing An Institutional TextGrid. Many of the tools used here for textual analysis and Named Entity Recognition are being contributed by the University of Sheffield and by the GATE project, respectively. Adam Funk (Sheffield University) illustrated the related technical solutions (GATE Teamware, GATE Cloud) in his presentation Introducing GATECloud.

In her talk "The SAWS Use Case: Linking Texts across Time and Space. Using TextGrid - Prospects and Proposals", Charlotte Roueché (King's College, London) focused on the requirements of a virtual research environment, and the tools and semantic technologies necessary to model transmission-related correlations between texts. In the subsequent discussion, essential issues within the Digital Humanities were adressed, amongst them the actual work in virtual research environments, the requirements of integrated tools, the general handling of cross-linked networks, and questions related to online-accessible research data. Related challenges and problems were raised, such as sustainability, interoperability, and provenance (who published / changed / annotated what and when?). The presentation TextGrid text-text-link editor's state-of-the-art was presented by Mark W. Küster (FH Worms) discussed this tool's current status and typical user profile.

The workshop was wrapped-up by a double feature named "Controlled Vocabularies and Text Mining - Use Cases at the Goettingen State and University Library". In the first part, Wolfgang Pempe (SUB Göttingen) reported on the current status of the implementation of semantic technologies and tools in TextGrid and presented the steps neccessary for linking TextGrid to the Linked Open Data Cloud. In the second part, Ralf Stockmann (SUB Göttingen) presented the Use Case Text Mining / Mental Maps using the example of eAQUA. europeana4D, a browser-based tool for the visualisation of geographic-historic relations, was also presented, and is being developed within the framework of EuropeanaConnect.

The day after the release of TextGrid 1.0, participants of the Digital Humanities Ceremony could explore the new software at various TextGridLab training sessions. The interactive workshops were well received: in the morning, some 60 participants attended the basic training session. After an introduction to the TextGrid project and its infrastructure, functions and features of the basic tools were presented with additional time set aside for user testing. In the afternoon, three parallel training sessions focused on the subject-specific tools of the TextGridLab. The XML-editor and the new metadata concept attracted, with some 40 attendants, most of the interest. Two further training sessions addressed the text-image-link-editor's range of functions as well as TextGrid music editor (to be released), which was presented to the public for the first time.

The following events by TextGrid or with TextGrid's participation will take place within the next weeks:

• 10.-16.10.2011:  2011 Annual Conference and Members’ Meeting of the TEI Consortium
• 26.-27.10.2011:  4th eSciDoc Days
• 12.-16.09.2011:  EDIROM Summer School, Universität Paderborn

For further information on past and upcoming events, please visit our Events page.

TextGrid documents:

• TextGrid 1.0 Manual
• New in the press kit:
• Interview with Heike Neuroth on the sustainability of virtual research environments and the limits of historically grown funding structures
• Interview with Werner Wegstein on the beginnings of TextGrid, about community building, and the beauty of TEI
• Report: Musterverträge und technische Umsetzung (Model Contracts and Technical Implementation, in german)
• Presentation: TextGrid Anwendungsfälle (TextGrid User Cases, PREZI presentation at the Digital Humanities Cermeony, in german)

DARIAH-DE

DARIAH-DE, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF), is a research project developing enduring research infrastructures for the humanities. Collaborating with scholars form a variety of humanistic disciplines, DARIAH-DE develops digital research methods, aiming at finding new answers to research questions and at establishing new research questions. The technological basis is defined by long-term archiving and linking of research data as well as by IT-supported tools for collaborative research based on this data.

DARIAH-DE forms the German contribution to the EU-EFSRI-project DARIAH-EU, and is responsible for the technological, content-related and organisational coordination amongst european and german infrastructures as well as research networks in the humanities.

NeDiMAH - Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities

The NeDiMAH Network will examine the practice of, and evidence for, advanced ICT methods in the arts and humanities across Europe, and articulate these findings in a series of outputs and publications. To accomplish this, NeDiMAH will provide a locus of networking and interdisciplinary exchange of expertise among the trans-European community of digital arts and humanities researchers, as well as those engaged with creating and curating scholarly and cultural heritage digital collections.

NeDiMAH will work closely with the EC funded DARIAH and CLARIN e-research infrastructure projects, as well as other national and international initiatives. The programme will bring together practitioners in a series of thematic Working Groups, which will examine the use of formal computationally-based methods for the capture, investigation, analysis, study, modelling, presentation, dissemination, publication and evaluation of arts and humanities materials for research. This research will contribute to the classification and expression of ICT methods used in the arts and humanities in three key outputs: a map visualising the ICT methodological commons; an enhanced ICT Methods Ontology; and a collaborative forum for the European community of practitioners active in this area. These outputs will serve to formalize and codify the expression of work in the digital arts and humanities, give greater academic credibility to this work, and enable peer-reviewed scholarship in this area.

NediMAH will maximise the value of national and international e-research infrastucture initiatives by developing a methodological layer that allows arts and humanities researchers to develop, refine and share research methods that allow them to create and make best use of digital methods and collections. Better contextualization of ICT Methods will also build human capacity, and be of particular benefit for early stage researchers.

NeDiMAH will run from 05/2011 til 05/2015.