TEXTvre supports the complete lifecycle of research in e-Humanities textual studies. The project provides researchers with advanced services to process and analyse research texts that are held in formally managed, metadata-rich institutional repositories. The access and analysis of textual research data will be supported by annotation and retrieval technology and will provide services for every step in the digital research life cycle.
The Software Sustainability Institute are helping to broaden the storage management available to TEXTvre and to improve usability.
Visit the TEXTvre website.
TEXTvre will build upon the success of the German TextGrid project, a collaborative environment for textual studies and a cornerstone in the emerging German e-Humanities agenda. TEXTvre will adopt, evaluate and expand TextGrid solutions to UK community needs, broadening its community of practice, and bringing together key organisations in the domain of e-Humanities textual studies in the UK. TEXTvre will embed the VRE within the day-to-day research practices at the institution, and will integrate it fully with institutional repository and data management infrastructures.
TEXTvre will provide an environment in which various tools can be integrated to support researchers in their work. Rather than focusing on particular tools, TEXTvre have started by considering categories of tool to support particular needs.
The TextGrid project currently uses the German D-Grid infrastructure for storage management.
The Software Sustainability Institute is working with TextGrid to help them achieve a major technical goal: to allow a local Fedora object repository to be used for storage instead of D-Grid, and to allow the Fedora repository to be queried directly for relationships between research objects. Further work within TEXTvre is focusing on usability, as TextGrid can be difficult to install. To address this problem, a virtual machine image will be developed to allow researchers to run local instances of TEXTvre with little setup.
Although the project is focused on a selected group of researchers, a key aim is to develop an extensible architecture and software that can be used in other disciplines and other institutions. The TEXTvre team will concentrate a lot of effort on dissemination, including practical demonstrations.
The TEXTvre project brings together researchers from the Centre for e-Research, the GATE natural language processing group at the University of Sheffield, Department of Digital Humanities, and the State and University Library Göttingen.