The new English-language Video Demo, which provides an introduction to using TextGridLab, is now ready to view.

To the TextGridLab Demo Video 2 - beta release, June 2010

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

• TextGridLab Beta Rev 6135 Released
• Updates to TextGridLab
• Tutorials Released
• TextGrid Workshops
• Cooperation
• Latest Events
• Recent Publications

This newsletter is a joint effort of all TextGrid partners. You can subscribe to it here.

Yours Sincerely,
The TextGrid Team

• TUSTEP developer-workshop
  
  To deepen the co-operation with the TUSTEP-community, the first developer-workshop for experienced TUSTEP- users took place at the university of Trier on 18/19 January 2010. Within this context the integration of own macros into the TextGrid environment was first theoretically illustrated and afterwards practically implemented. On the second day Tobias Ott introduced his concept of a XML-based TUSTEP-syntax which might replace the TUSTEP user interface which is perceived as out of date. As a conclusion the workshop seemed to be affected by this future-oriented idea and a positive atmosphere in total.

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• User-workshops in Frankfurt and Munich
  
  The first two courses of instruction for experts were hosted on 17 February 2010 in Frankfurt/Main in context of the conference of the “workgroup for German language Edition” as well as on 17 March 2010 organized by and held at the University of Munich by the Munich Centre for Textual Scholarship (MüZE). These predominantly interactive arranged courses should give experts of areas such as edition philology and librarianship an understanding of the concept of TextGrid and basics of the TextGridLab. Also, participating experts should get the opportunity to ask questions about the introduced topics and beyond these. At this juncture the positive resonance in spite of the beta-stage of the software about it was just as pleasant as the contact to academics and scientist who are interested in further co-operation

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• Content-Provider-Workshop in Goettingen
  
  Representatives of research projects and libraries attended the first TextGrid content provider workshop in Goettingen an 22 April 2010. The topics covered the possibilities of providing and archiving data in the TextGridRep.
  

  In the first part of the event, TextGrid showed how data is fed into and held accessible in the TextGridRep. Several models of long-time archiving were introduced as well as the new metadata application profile. Moreover, Ralf Stockmann of the Center for Retrospective Digitization in Goettingen presented a prototypically developed visualisation tool. In the second part, the participants voiced their expectations about TextGrid in several short preasentations. While Jutta Weber of the State Library Berlin and Thomas Stäcker of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbuettel focused on the exchange and accessibility of data, Daniel Graepler of the project Archaeo 18 as well as Martina Kerzel and Annina Böhme of the project Blumenbach-Online made convrete demands on tools, possibilities of visualisation and support of project specific metadata.

  TextGrid will respond to the general interest in a similar event with the second content provider workshop on 22 June 2010, where the specific needs of the projects Archaeo 18 and Blumenbach-Online will be highlighted.

• Latest Version: Revision 6135 (2010-05-06)
• Updates: Changelog

The TextGridLab will be continually redeveloped and regularly released with new functionalities for public testing.

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@textgrid.de.support(at)textgrid.de

• 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