Andrea Rapp

TextGrid – eine virtuelle Forschungsumgebung für die Geisteswissenschaften

TextGrid is the first virtual research environment (VRE) for the Digital Humanities currently available and usable software with a focus on text-oriented research. With the release of a version 2.0 in May 2012, TextGrid offers a stable infrastructure and productively usable in research projects. TextGrid is part of a larger infrastructure, the D-Grid-initiative, and is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

TextGrid serves as a VRE for philologists, linguists, musicologists, and art historians, disciplines that have recently joined include philosophy, Jewish studies, archaeology, and the history of science. Built on grid architecture, its web-based platform provides services and tools for researchers for analysis of textual data in various digital archives – independently from data formats, place, and software. An important objective of TextGrid is to develop tools that allow enhanced retrieval, manipulation, and analysis of data. The focus is not only on letter-based information, but also music notation and digitized art objects.

The core of the TextGrid infrastructure is the so-called TextGridRep, a grid-based repository for reliable storage and sustainable availability of and access to research data, which will ensure interoperability. The independence of data formats is provided by the use of the standards e.g. of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) which collectively develops and maintains guidelines for the representation of texts in digital form specifying encoding methods for machine-readable texts – especially in the humanities and social sciences. The access to the repository is given by the TextGridLab (Laboratory), a web-based platform which provides access not only to content but to scholarly tools and services. sciences (including linguistics). As portable software the TextGridLab will not modify the computer ́s operating system; for example, it can also be started from a USB drive. Tools will be available globally that previously only were available on a local level.

In this way, a platform can be constructed in which experts in different subject areas can concentrate on the problems of a constantly evolving research landscape with the help of up-to-date methods and procedures independently of time or location. The crucial point of the TextGrid-concept is not only an accumulation of universally applicable tools. It is intended to be a platform for the exchange of tools and methods as well as content. The modular open source platform can be extended easily for special projects or users purposes.

The workshop TextGrid should be used to work with concrete research material. In small digital editions most of the tools and services of TextGrid will be demonstrated and applied:

1. The Project & User Management allows the creation and administration of projects and user rights.
2. The Metadata Schema, that is also been used for searches across projects, can be adapted to the concrete needs of a project.
3. Using the XML-Editor, the editor can choose between more technical views with all tags and attributes and more graphical oriented views using CSS and XSLT.
4. The Text Image Link Editor can be used for connecting segment of texts with segments of images.
5. A lot of other tools like the Workflow Tool will be demonstrated as well as more subject-specific tools like linguistic and philological tools that can be added from the TextGrid Marketplace.
6. The publication in the TextGrid Repository is supported by an automatic validation of metadata and provides PIDs to make the source quotable for the scientific usage.

For more information, please visit: http://www.textgrid.de/en.html