SMART-GS system: a software for historians by historians Susumu Hayashi (Kyoto University), Kenro Aihara (National Institute of Informatics), Minao Kukita and Makoto Ohura (Kyoto University)

SMART-GS/HCP project 1 The first version of SMART-GS was designed by Hayashi and built by his soft engineering student Kobayashi as his master thesis work. It was designed to help Hayashi’s study of a mathematical diary of 19-20th century German mathematician David Hilbert. Although the most part of the research was done before the system become available, the system proved its usefulness to solve a philological problem by handwritten document search.

SMART-GS/HCP project 2 Another historian Kazu Nagai suggested to make it a general purpose historical research tool. Hayashi and his co-workers started the change, and Aihara joined the project to build a network server for collaborative historical research. After 5 year efforts, it is now a realistic historical tool and the network collaboration features will be available in some months.

SMART-GS/HCP project 3 SMART-GS is now used by three research groups of Japanese modern history. http://en.sourceforge.jp/projects/smart-gs/ The Japanese Society for the History of Economic Thought http://jshet.net/ is interested in the system and a course on the system for young researchers is planned in December.

People building the system Susumu Hayashi: Historian, ex-software engineering professor Kenro Aihara: IT researcher HCP server built by TriAx company under his supervision Minao Kukita: Philosopher Makoto Ohura: Linguist Yuuta Yamanaka: IT engineer Hayashi’s ex-students

Wrong subtitle? Hayashi, Kukita, Ohura and Yamashita are writing the codes of SMART-GS. Exactly speaking, it is a system for historians by a historian, a philosopher and a linguist. However, the chief architect and the present main programmer* is Hayashi. *) The man who writes most lines of code.

And… Many important ideas came from Hayashi’s colleague Prof. Kazu Nagai, a known historian of modern Japanese politics. Without Nagai, SMART-GS would not be like the present one. Thus, he is virtually a co-system designer. Kukita is a co-worker of Hayashi’s research of Kyoto School of Philosophy: a research of history of thoughts (history of ideas, 思想史)

It is a system for historians mostly by historians Thus! It is a system for historians mostly by historians

Seeing once is better than hearing a hundred times! Come to the demo session and see the system.

Book pages annotated by underlines & marginal notes, etc. Bookmark by PostIt Flag Marginal note

Linked annotations: relationship of annotations A region marked up by the brace Brace A line linking the region and the note Marginal note

Annotations for historical documents Hayashi’s text analysis of the diary of 19-20th century German Mathematician David Hilbert, who is said the father of 20th century mathematics.

What are we doing? Annotating images of book pages and historical documents by adding markups, bookmarks and texts (e.g. marginal notes) relating them each other by links and, further relating them to resources outside: books, papers & Web resources, e.g. references to papers , books and documents in archives.

For the cases of Web and PDF documents… Cyber documents, e.g. PDF files and HTML files, can be digitally annotated in similar ways. Furthermore, words in such digital documents are searchable. Imagine that historical documents can be digitally annotated and are searchable. Examples of such documents: handwriting documents, e.g. Hilbert’s diary. Image-base digital archives of books, journals and other documents, now widely available on Web thanks to some libraries…

The goal of SMART-GS project Providing platforms for marking up, linking and searching historical documents on PC and on the network. We have already built a JAVA application SMART-GS with the full functions required except the network features, and it has been applied to several real and important historical studies. http://en.sourceforge.jp/projects/smart-gs/ And, the network features is now going to be implemented, as shown by Minao Kukita in the demo session.

Working with SMART-GS on three wide monitors A snapshot of my desktop. SMART-GS, an online digital archive, wikipedia, and a digital version of early 20th century dictionary

Towards tools on the Net Historians with similar interests are often scattered through the globe. They wish to share knowledge for every-day researches, but it is not so easy. SMART-GS technology will provide an excellent help for world-wide collaborations of a team of historians. It may also provide a dramatic improvement on image-base online digital archives of handwritten and/or printed historical documents. The key of such network version is the way the annotation was attached to images of historical documents: Gsx-file.

Gsx-file: an XML file storing annotations and others Annotations are converted into the XML-format and stored in gs-file = + Document image

Inside of a gsx-file

Different gsx-files provide different views on the same historical text

A model of network version -archive model- Solid line is annotating and looking at Broken line is just looking at historian Archive Annotation by gs-file Gs-file Annotation by gs-file Images historian Historian publish their own gs-files to annotate document images in a public archive. They can annotate also gs-files of other historians. Gs-file reader A reader can browse views of historians, if a historian makes his view open to the public.

The network version would be able to markup digital archives

Another model of a network version -online collaboration model- Historian publish their own document images and gs-files (views). They comment to views of other researchers. Images+gs-file historian historian Images+gs-file historian Images+gs-file reader

Conclusion SMART-GS system has been applied to studies of several important historical documents in the modern history and proved its usefulness. The network version nearly completed by Aihara and Kukita is expected to be useful for research collaborations and using digital archives.