I know I’m getting into the game a bit late, but I’d like to throw out a few ideas for a shared session or set of demos.

I’m the lead developer of a project in the English Department at UT Austin for collaborative word-level annotation of literary texts. The goal of our application is to take a digital edition of a text (possibly a TEI file exported from an application like Adam’s) and allow a class of undergraduates (or graduate students) to write all over it, producing shared tags and threaded comments associated with specific words or phrases.

The project incorporates ideas from a number of different existing applications: In many ways it’s like the Institute for the Future of the Book’s CommentPress, but the annotation can be word-level rather than paragraph-level. It is intended to operate a bit like Awesome Highlighter or the many online whiteboard applications, but is more structured. It is inspired by elements of Word Hoard, Juxta, and the Amazon Online Reader, but it’s multiuser and networked.

We currently have an early prototype of the application hosted at UT’s Computer Writing and Research Lab. The prototype is implemented in PHP and MySQL and uses the Smarty templating engine. We’re only beginning to think through the possibilities for visualization: for example, the prototype uses “heat maps” to show density of commentary, etc.

I’d love to hear about similar projects, or other solutions that people have used to allow students to do collaborative close reading online.

I’d also like to talk about the ways that people are modeling texts. Of course XML and TEI are great for archiving and exchanging texts, but it seems to me that we also need to be thinking about the kinds of data structures that we use to represent texts in our applications. Treating texts as trees can be a useful fiction, but it also limits what we do with them. Our application represents texts as collections of ranges over tokens, from which XML or HTML trees can be generated on demand (the system is inspired by Gavin Nicol’s Attributed Range Algebra). I’d be interested to hear how other people are tackling the problems posed by intersecting hierarchies and XML.

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