TextGrid Newsletter 02 [October 20, 2006]

The TextGrid newsletter has grown to more than 100 subscribers. We are glad about your interest and thank for your participation. This special issue reports from the recent <philtag> workshop with international e-Humanities experts, and announces a seminar about ongoing grid activities in Göttingen (November 23).

More details about these and other topics are available on the TextGrid homepage at www.textgrid.de

 

This Newsletter contains

• Current status of the project
  
• Report from the <philtag/> workshop
  
• Goettingen Grid Seminar, November 23
  
• Constitution of the TextGrid Advisory Committee
• Conference reports 

 

Current Status of the Project

TextGrid has picked up its productive work in February 2006 and is in line with the project plan. The team has designed an initial version of the architecture and is currently evaluating several of its components. Above that, TextGrid is in touch with several relevant initiatives in the field, aiming to build its infrastructure upon broad international consent and seek synergies where suitable.

Eight partners with domain experts (textual criticism, lexicography, linguistics) and technologists contribute to TextGrid. An advisory committee with international experts guides TextGrid to attain its goals. In tandem with its e-Humanities focus, TextGrid is tightly embedded in the national D-Grid programme (www.d-grid.de) to establish a generic German grid infrastructure. Communication across disciplinary boundaries with other D-Grid community projects has proved most useful for TextGrid, and integration of the German e-Science landscape is ongoing.

More information on the TextGrid project plan is available at the corresponding area of the website.Work Packages For details on partnering D-Grid projects please refer to www.d-grid.de

 

<philtag/> workshop

<philtag/> is a recurring meeting of digital humanities experts. The Competence Centre for  Computer  Philology at the University Wuerzburg hosted the fifth <philtag/> workshop and invited international experts in the field. A focus of the meeting was the application of the TEI format (Text Encoding Initiative), with hands-on tutorials by the TEI experts Sebastian Rahtz and Laurent Romary. In addition to that Peter Boot from the Huygens Institute in the Netherlands presented the annotation tool EDITOR.

 

Goettingen Grid Seminar

Grid technologies are being projected as the revolution of the Internet, e-Science as the future of scientific communication and collaboration. Formerly applied solely in high energy physics, astronomy and other "hard sciences", these concepts increasingly immerse and span all scientific disciplines. - But what actually is e-Science and grid all about? Who applies these concepts and technologies, and what is their likely influence on our everyday lives?

The Goettingen Grid Seminar discusses these questions. Wolfgang Gentzsch, coordinator of the national grid initiative D-Grid, gives an introduction before ongoing grid activities in Goettingen present their work and hence provide a very practical introduction into the issues involved. These projects include MediGrid, who apply grid technologies in the life sciences, the technology project Instant-Grid with a demo of their software, and TextGrid who aim to transfer grid technologies to the humanities. Contributing an international perspective to the event, we are particularly glad to have Tobias Blanke introduce the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHeSSC) in the UK.

The seminar will be held in German. Everybody interested in network technologies and curious about the possible future infrastructure of scientific communication and collaboration is invited to come. The agenda and further details are available here.

 

Constitution of the TextGrid Advisory Committee

TextGrid's activities are guided and reviewed by a group of international experts. Advisory Committee members have a range of different backgrounds and perspective, both in digital humanities as well as grid technologies. Regular meetings of the committee will be held, and discussion is also fostered between those meetings.

 

Conference Reports

• October 2006: Sustainability in the D-Grid  (presentation)
  With regard to sustainability the different grid-projects were presented and discussed on October, 9th and 10th in Karlsruhe. The workshop was arranged by the D-Grid project. [presentation]
  
  
• September 2006: InetBib Conference in Muenster (presentation)
  The 9th InetBib conference in Münster, September 6.-8. 2006 includes a talk about TextGrid: "TextGrid - a Community Grid for text-based disciplines". [presentation]
  
  
• September 2006: GridKa School 2006  (presentation)
  The Grid Computing Centre Karlsruhe (GridKa) hosts one of the largest summer schools related to grid technologies. More than 100 participants benefited from the experiences of major grid initiatives, including EGEE, NorduGrid, and Int.Eu.Grid. TextGrid presented the humanities' perspective in e-science and grid. [presentation]

• September 2006:  UK All Hands Meeting (postersession)
  AHeSSC represented TextGrid by a postersession.
  
  
• July 2006: Networking Structure-Workshop (presentation)
  Workshop hosted by AG Elektronisches Publizieren der Akademienunion, München.
  

• July 2006: ISC2006, 21st International Supercomputer Conference (postersession)
  TextGrid joined the ISC2006 with a poster.

 
 

Events at which TextGrid is to be involved/represented:

• TEI Annual Members' Meeting
  TextGrid participates in the TEI Annual Members' Meeting, October27-28 in Canada with a presentation.
• E-Science Workshop, Amsterdam
  A talk on TextGrid will be given at  the 2nd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid-Computing in Amsterdam, December 4-6.
• Digital Historical Corpora - Architecture, Annotation, and Retrieval
  Representatives of the TextGrid project will attend this seminar held on Decemeber 3-8 at Schloss Dagstuhl in Wadern..
• IEEE DEST 2007
  At the Inaugural IEEE International Digital Ecosystems and Technologies Conference, held in February 21-23, 2007 in Australia, TextGrid is represented in special session 3: "e-Humanities for Digital Eco-systems".
  Recipients who are interested in presenting a paper about their eHumanities project to an international audience are requested to contact Prof. Küster  as soon as possible.
• GES 2007 
  TextGrid will attend the German e-Science Conference 2007 held in Baden-Baden, May 2-4, 2007.

 

TextGrid Info

Do you have any questions about TextGrid? Do not hesitate to send an e-mail to:

 

Newsletter

The Newsletter is produced in cooperation with the TextGrid partners.
You can subscribe/unsubscribe for the newletter on the homepage in the area Newsletter. There is also an archive containing all previous newsletters.

 

Archive

TextGrid Newsletter 01   [1. Juni 2006]