Through our university and grant-funded fellowships, we often have students who are available to participate in faculty projects, and at a high level. In the past, students have helped with developing document encoding practices, validating data against original sources, writing commentary on texts, and developing GIS prototypes. We've trained students for these tasks in a variety of ways: formal training sessions, ad hoc gatherings, and one-on-one instruction.
Of all the things we do, we're most proud of the contributions that students have made to our projects. They've brought a spirit of investigation and creativity to our efforts that in many ways is more important than actual tasks they've performed.
We develop and manage data requirements in a number of different formats. Our particular expertise is in TEI-encoded texts. TEI (the Text Encoding Initiative) is a international standard for encoding texts in XML, thus making them machine-readable. To preserve, version, and control access to our documents, we use Subversion, a standard version control system most often used for program source code, but well-suited to our purposes. The Spenser, Bizet and RCLGA projects are especially TEI-intensive.
We also design, implement and manage relational databases on OS/X, Linux and Solaris platforms. Our database management system of choice is MySQL. We typically provide access to databases via a version of the Django web framework which we've customized for our purposes. We currently maintain relational databases for the Spenser, Material Culture in the German Novel, and Inventing the Federal Government projects.
Lastly, we're proficient in managing image and video data. The Spenser and RCLGA projects depend upon large number of images. And we provide video support to Arts & Sciences and the Provost's office.
When necessary, we'll develop software specifically for a project. Some examples:
For the Bizet and Spenser projects, we developed a web server for delivering XML content, processed by a variety of XSL stylesheets, in a number of different interfaces.
For the Spenser and RCLGA projects, we developed a viewer for very large collections of high-resolution images. A sample is available here.
We're especially interested in developing complex interfaces to answer requirements unique to particular projects. For the Spenser project, we've developed two: a forme analysis tool used to determine variant textual states in early Modern printed texts (a video demo is available here), and a tool which greatly simplifies the creation of links between XML documents (a video demo is here).
Lastly, we're interested in devising public interfaces that simplify the presentation of complex information. Some examples are a mock-up presenting some poems by Spenser, along with some associated textual and critical apparatus; a tag cloud viewer which presents the sources for Jan Van Der Noot's A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings; and another tag cloud viewer, which compares two German novels (an early result from the Material Culture in the German novel project).