Context and Relationships Developing Electronic Research Tools for Irish Studies

Project Overview Goal: Develop tools, specifically tailored to Irish Studies, which enable digital corpora to be easily and rapidly merged, referenced to one another, indexed, searched, and exchanged. Method: Use XML markup embedded into digitized texts to track and compile citations and basic information associated with people, places, events, translational cruxes, et.al.

Affiliated Projects and Persons Paul Ell of Queen's University – Belfast is overseeing the preparation of a digital corpus containing the full runs of over 100 Irish Studies journals and publications. Barry Pateman, editor of the Emma Goldman Papers, is developing editorial procedures in collaboration with Berkeley's School of Information to allow editor's notes to be embedded in digital texts and easily shared with editors of the same or similar material. Professor Daniel Melia and myself provide the perspective of humanities scholars. The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) and the Berkeley School of Information are providing the programming talent and advanced search abilities needed for the project.

A Three Step Approach First: Develop a “context finder.” This phase was debuted by Daniel Melia at the 30 th CCC as the “Irish Review Interface” which enabled users to quickly tag and search for words in the text on several websites in a few clicks. Second: Develop a “context builder.” This tool will ultimately enable users to easily find citations relating to people, places, events, et.al., across numerous digital corpora in one convenient location. Third: Develop a “context provider.” With a large body of citations and compatible digital corpora amassed from the development of the “context builder” a final tool should enable text to be prepared with minimal HTML markup and “fed through” the program so that it is automatically marked up with people, places, events, etc. which are already documented by the tool.

Context Builder Interface

Context Provider Design

Planned Editorial Setup

Features Projected for Third Phase Facing page view of standardized text and translation. Easy transition between three dimensions of a text: manuscript, diplomatic edition or transcription, and translation.