• Latest Version: Revision 5278 (2010-02-05)
• Updates: Changelog.

With the beta version of TextGridLab, the client application from TextGrid, you can access services and tools in the grid and edit text files. The software is and will continue to be available free of charge. Installation is easy -- download TextGridLab to your computer today! As portable software the TextGridLab will not modify your computer's operating system; for example, it can also be started from a USB drive.

Please test the beta version thoroughly and report bugs or make suggestions for improvements to the software. If you require assistance using the TextGridLab, please email us at support(at)textgrid.de.

First Steps:

	Download and Installation	Text
	Log-In	Text

Tools and Services:

	Navigator	Text
	User Administration	Text

Additional Features:

Importing Files

Text

For further information, please consult the User’s Manual TextGrid-Tools (Release: 25.10.2009, PDF). Please note that the TextGridLab is available in a beta test version, meaning that the software is currently under development and therefore the range of available functions is still limited. Additional tutorials will be released shortly.

Please test the beta version thoroughly and report bugs or make suggestions for improvements to the software. If you require assistance using the TextGridLab, please email us at support(at)textgrid.de.

2,347,703,384 Characters Worth of Culturally-Valuable Texts Freely Available

TextGrid, Wikimedia, and Creative Commons Germany^[1] are cooperating to make an extensive collection of texts freely available.

The research group TextGrid recently obtained the texts of the online library zeno.org with financial support from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)^[2]. This digital collection is the most comprehensive of its kind in the German-speaking areas and contains texts from the beginning of printing to the first decades of the 20th century.  

TextGrid, Wikimedia Germany and Creative Commons Germany are now cooperating in order to make this collection of texts freely usable for the general public. Wikimedia will soon make the collection available with the assistance of TextGrid. Subsequent use of the texts will be possible without restriction if they are comprised of contents that are in the public domain (particularly in terms of the digitalized texts themselves). If additional data for providing access is included (bibliographic metadata, for example), it will be covered under the license CC-BY 3.0 de^[3]. This license primarily requires the attribution of the licensor and is moreover recognized by the Free Software Foundation as “free license”^[4].

“With the selection of the Creative Commons License, legal certainty will result for every subsequent user of the texts, since in addition to the copyright status of the actual work, the question of ancillary copyright is thereby resolved, and the licensor waives all rights resulting from this protection to the fullest extent possible,” explained Michael Weller of the European Academy of Computing in Law (Legal Project Management for Creative Commons Germany).

Every Internet user will receive free access to the data and can further process and reuse the data holdings as long as the attribution requirement is observed. For projects sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, new possibilities emerge: “With free access to the data, the projects carried out by Wikimedia Foundation, such as Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons, and their users can provide and link the works of the collection of texts in their accumulation of knowledge,” commented Mathias Schindler from Wikimedia Germany.

The general public as well as specialized research communities will benefit from this cooperation: “The primary task of the Digital Humanities is no longer digitalization, as it was in the 90s, but instead the methodically innovative development of structured data sets. With this cooperation we will make access to this information possible not only to research communities but also to the general public,” said Dr. Heike Neuroth, TextGrid Project Manager at the Lower Saxony State- and University Library Göttingen.

During the next three years, TextGrid will prepare the collection for scholarly use (for example, the conversion into TEI, with more extensive markup for more precise research) and make it available in a virtual research environment together with appropriate tools for further processing. The scholarly communities are requested to vote on the desired licensing conditions for their research data resulting from this textual foundation^[5].

[1] Legal Project Management for Creative Commons Germany, supported by the European Academy of Computing in Law (EEAR) and the Institute of Law and Informatics at Saarland University (IFRI).
[2] Press release from the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen on 2 December 2009 (in German)
[3] Creative Commons License cc-by
[4] Statement of the FSF on the CC-License types BY and BY-SA
[5] Vote on the Licensing Conditions for Scholarly Use in TextGrid (in German)

GridBriefing December 2009: "Digitising culture: Grids and eHumanities"

With this acquisition, TextGrid will be able to make these texts available for research according to scientific standards (e.g. permanent citable and annotated in TEI/XML). Using this collection, researchers will be able to work with texts in a variety of ways, such as statistically evaluating them, comparing variations, and compiling textual corpora in order to integrate them into research projects. In this way, computer-assisted textual analysis and the preparation of critical editions will be considerably simplified.

TextGrid has obtained this digital library under a Creative Commons (CC) License 3.0, which prevents the data from being used for commercial purposes. Under this license, TextGrid can make the digital library available under one of two access options: CC 3.0 by, nc (Attribution-Noncommercial) or CC 3.0 by, nc, sa (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike). The main difference between these two types of licenses, the Share Alike condition, becomes important when users wish to distribute or publish a new work using data from the digital library.

For example, if users have created a critical edition based on texts in the digital library, under CC 3.0 by, nc (Attribution-Noncommercial) they are required to attribute their data source and cannot use their critical edition for commercial purposes, but they themselves can determine the licensing conditions under which their own work is to be made available.

Under CC 3.0 by, nc, sa (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike), users must make their work available under the same conditions as the original data. On the one hand, this license model would support a research environment in which the digital library could serve as a foundation for a variety of freely available textual data and research material available to every user. On the other hand, under this model, users who are opposed to the freely available transmission of their data might be less interested in incorporating the data available in the digital library into their own work, thus potentially restricting the research possibilities of this collection.

In order to represent the interests of the German-speaking scientific community, TextGrid invites researchers to take part in a vote on the licensing conditions of the acquired texts for future usage. From 1 December 2009 until 31 January 2010, users can determine which type of Creative Commons License 3.0 will be used: CC 3.0 by, nc (Attribution-Noncommercial) or CC 3.0 by, nc, sa (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike).

Vote on Licensing Conditions (in German)
Press release from the University of Göttingen (in German)

Your TextGrid Team

Job advertisement by FH Worms and University of Trier

Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks - CHAIN

A meeting was held at King's College, London, on 26th and 27th October 2009, between representatives of the following networks, infrastructure projects, and planning initiatives working with digital technologies in the Arts and Humanities:

• arts-humanities.net
• ADHO - Association of Digital Humanities Organisations
• CLARIN
• centerNet
• DARIAH
• NoC - Network of Expert Centres in Great Britain and Ireland
• Project Bamboo
• TextGrid

We identified the current fragmented environment where researchers operate in separate areas with often mutually incompatible technologies as a barrier to fully exploiting the transformative role that these technologies can potentially play. We resolved that our present, proposed, and future activities are  interdependent and complementary and should be oriented towards working together to overcome barriers, and to create a shared environment where technology services can interoperate and be sustained, thus enabling new forms of research in the Humanities.

In order to achieve these goals we agreed to form the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks – CHAIN. CHAIN will act as a forum forareas of shared interest to its participants, including:

• advocacy for an improved  digital research infrastructure for the Humanities;
• development of sustainable business models;
• promotion of technical interoperability of resources, tools and services;
• promotion of good practice and relevant technical standards;
• development of a shared service infrastructure;
• coordinating approaches to legal and ethical issues;
• interactions with other relevant computing infrastructure initiatives;
• widening the geographical scope of our coalition.

CHAIN will promote an open culture where experiences, including successes and failures, can be shared and discussed, in order to support and promote the use of digital technologies in research in the Humanities.

Sheila Anderson, King's College, London (DARIAH)
Andreas Aschenbrenner, State and University Library Göttingen (TextGrid, DARIAH)
David Greenbaum, University of California, Berkeley (Project Bamboo)
Seth Denbo, King's  College, London (DARIAH)
Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland (centerNet)
Chad Kainz, University of Chicago (Project Bamboo)
Steven Krauwer, Utrecht University (CLARIN)
Lorna Hughes, King's  College, London (ADHO, NoC)
Tobias Blanke, King's College, London (DARIAH)
Torsten Reimer, King's  College, London (arts-humanities.net)
David Robey, University of Oxford (NoC)
Harold Short, King's  College, London  (ADHO)
Katherine Walter, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (centerNet)
Peter Wittenburg, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (CLARIN)
Martin Wynne, University of Oxford (CLARIN, DARIAH)

• TextGrid Newsletter 06
• press release, University of Göttingen, 2009/09/17 (German)

In this edition you will find information on the following topics:

1. Second project phase of TextGrid funded
2. A Look Back at the TextGrid Summit
3. TextGridLab Beta Release
4. Cooperation
5. Latest Events
6. Recent Publications

Newsletter Subscription
Newsletter Archive

We hope you enjoy the news.
Sincerely, the new TextGrid Team

The performance of the data model was tested by samples of different periods of music history and the outcome gave an opportunity to discuss complex problems of different edition projects (Hildegard von Bingen, Beethoven, Gluck, Weber, Debussy etc.).

During  the next meeting in spring 2010 in Detmold, a special interest group will draft a first version of the user documentation for MEI, and convert the data format to ODD (One Document does it all) in order to provide a better compatibility to TEI as well as to achieve a greater flexibility of the format.

The TextGridLab will be expanded to a comfortable and intuitive operable entrance to the virtual research ambit based on the evaluation, which has already begun. The grid–infrastructure and the TextGrid repository will be scaled and linked with other initiatives.

New academic communities from art history, classical philology and musicology have joined the TextGrid consortium. The tools and services will be fitted to their requirements:

• Art history: annotation of image data
• Classical philology: edition of glosses
• Musicology: integration of notes in XML editor

It is also planned that TextGrid will integrate another academic discipline and its tools into the running project.

In general, the focus is on assembling a community in which researchers as well as developers could participate actively in order to advance TextGrid and to link available tools and services with TextGrid. Therefore, many workshops and training sessions will be offered in the course of the project. Interoperatibility and the observance of standards are prominent goals of TextGrid, especially with regard to the many e-Humanities and e-Research initiatives with which TextGrid is and will be cooperating.

For further information see the official version of the project application.