Edition Production Technology (EPT) and the ARCHway Project[1]
Kevin Kiernan, Principal Investigator, Department of English, University of Kentucky
Alex Dekhtyar, co-PI, Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky
Jerzy W. Jaromzcyk, co-PI, Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky
Dorothy Carr Porter, Research in Computing for Humanities, University of Kentucky
Ionut Emil Iacob, Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky
The ARCHway Project (Architecture for
Research in Computing for Humanities through collaborative research, teaching,
and learning) is an unusual collaboration of scholars and students in computer
science and the humanities who
seek to identify and solve problems of mutual importance in building image-based
electronic editions of significant cultural materials. To accomplish these
goals, ARCHway is developing a workbench of integrated tools, called Edition Production Technology, or
EPT. Using its underlying
programming platform, Eclipse, we are creating new editing tools and
integrating those tools already developed under other projects, and then using
these tools to prepare image-based electronic editions.
I. Background
The concept of electronic editing tools began under the Electronic Beowulf project, when the need for these tools became evident, and continued under the Digital Atheneum project with the development of a Glossary Tool.[2] The production of focused, well-designed, XML-based editing tools began in earnest in Fall 2002 under the Electronic Boethius project (see figure 1).[3]
Fig. 1- Electronic Boethius Electronic Editions Environment (E3)
In this phase the Electronic Boethius team, under the programming leadership of Ionut Emil Iacob, created a Java prototype EPT called the Electronic Editions Environment, or E3, which integrated the Glossary Tool with text and an XML tagging capability to facilitate searching of text and glossary. During this period the team also developed several standalone tools in Java, designed to incorporate images, which E3 also integrated.[4] Thus, while we had a prototype of EPT in E3, the continual requirement to integrate emerging new tools posed a significant programming problem.
II. The Integrated Platform
When the ARCHway project began in Spring 2003, Jerzy W. Jaromczyk, one of two co-PIs in Computer Science, advised us to reprogram these standalone tools and develop all new tools using the Eclipse programming environment, an open-source platform originally developed by IBM, now broadly used and actively enhanced by the open-source community.[5] Although this move required reprogramming of our editing tools, Eclipse suited the needs of ARCHway and the Electronic Boethius in two ways. First, it provided an effective software architecture for the production and deployment of the EPT, which is now organized as a set of distinct plugin tools that work together through Eclipse. Each tool is responsible for a specific editing or administrative task, and the tools can also work with one another through the platform, effectively borrowing functionality and allowing for the creation of new tools without having to reprogram established functions.[6] Second, Eclipse is an ideal environment for the teaching and learning aims of ARCHway. The EPTÕs plugin design makes it possible to assign individual tools to research assistants, to computer science students as class projects, and to teams of computer science and humanities students collaborating on Masters and Informatics projects.
The programming teams use the appropriate Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) available in the Eclipse Plugin Development Platform to build all editing tools. To insure that these tools are in fact useful for editors, the programmers always work under the guidance of the editor/PI and in consultation with the humanities research assistants. The programmers can integrate tools-in-progress into the EPT, because Eclipse comes with a Concurrent Versioning System (CVS), which permits multiple users to modify the same files without overwriting one anotherÕs work.[7] CVS is especially valuable for ARCHway, as everyone works collaboratively on both programming and editing. CVS also contributes in important ways to the teaching and learning goals of ARCHway, because for testing and grading purposes the Principal Investigators require continual, reliable access to the most recent tools and editing projects.
Another
advantage of Eclipse is that it helps achieve uniformity, adaptability, and
extensibility in areas that can raise high hurdles for complex humanities
computing projects. The Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) developed under
Eclipse are attractive and uniform, and humanities editors can easily configure
them without new programming support by using XML configuration files. Eclipse
works across operating systems, allowing Windows and Linux (and Macintosh, to a
some extent) to support the same tools with the same native appearance. The
programming platform also provides automatic updating for the emerging tools, a
critical capability that encourages the refinement and expansion of features as
well as the correction of programming errors or bugs in the EPT. In the long run this capability will
enable automatic online upgrades to the completed electronic editions. With its
strong support for XML and its high quality imaging capabilities, Eclipse is
thus in many ways ideal for the development of image-based electronic editions.
III. Edition Production Technology
The EPT now consists of three software layers: one for editing and administrative tools, one for middleware, and one for data management (figure 2).
Fig. 2 - ARCHway
Model for Edition Production Technology (EPT)
The editing and administrative tools provide the functionality for managing projects and editing primary resource images and text, just as the presentation tools will eventually provide the functionality for using the completed image-based editions in interactive displays and searching facilities. The middleware layer, under the guidance of Jaromczyk and the other Computer Science co-PI, Alex Dekhtyar, provides the utility plugins that allow the upper-level tools to communicate with each other and share image-enriched information of all kinds from the data management layer, DekhtyarÕs domain. The data management layer contains the routines devoted to storage, maintenance and retrieval of the information from the image-based electronic edition. The utility plugins in the middleware layer provide functionality that is shared with the editing and administrative tools. The Project Explorer organizes current projects and completed editions, and provides a logical view of all project files regardless of their physical location. The Data Source Layer acts as a middle ground between the EPT editing tools and the project files and provides the physical location of the project files for the editing tools. One utility plugin that the editor uses is the Keyboard, set by default to the Old English character set. Like all the plugins, the Keyboard plugin is easily modified in configuration files to support character sets for other languages and other projects.
IV. The Editing Tools
The main tools originally developed under
the Electronic Boethius project include
a ScripText environment for integrating images and text; a Glossary Tool for
building comprehensive glossaries from a XML text file; a Tagger for inserting
XML markup, based on the images, in the text file; a DucType tool for
paleographical description, analysis, and encoding; and an OverLay tool for
comparing and encoding multiple images of a folio taken under different
lighting conditions. Although first developed in the Electronic Editions
Environment (E3), the tools held a somewhat precarious existence as
independent, stand-alone programs. Under ARCHway
the reprogrammed tools now form
the basic editing toolkit for the EPT. We are continually developing new tools
under both projects and integrating them into the EPT. An editor can organize
these tools in any desirbable combination, called ÒperspectivesÓ (see figure
3), to suit different editing and administrative tasks.
Fig. 3 - OverLay perspective with xTagger and Statistics tools
The editor can save perspectives and navigate between different perspectives, to perform any number of editorial and administrative tasks in the same project (see figure 4).
Fig. 4 Ð ImagText perspective with xTagger and Glossary tools
V. Using the EPT
To keep the EPT as adaptable, extensible, and interoperable as possible, ARCHway is using in its testbed three important manuscripts from the British Library, Beowulf, Alfred the GreatÕs Old English translation of BoethiusÕs Consolation of Philosophy, and AElfricÕs Lives of Saints. One by one and as a group these fire-damaged manuscripts[8] present editors with widely different editing problems and computer scientists with equally challenging technical problems. The Electronic Beowulf at once serves as our guide for a fully funtioning image-based electronic edition (see figure 5) and as a Òlegacy documentÓ we expect the EPT to transform in the course of time.
Fig. 5 - Electronic Beowulf with image, text, glossary, textual note, and search
facility
While we are creating the EPT for editing Old English manuscripts, the ARCHway project has as its longterm goal the general purpose of contributing ideas and practical solutions for preserving and propagating any hand-written materials from the vast and varied heritage of world culture. We believe that ARCHwayÕs EPT architecture for building image-based electronic editions is an effective model for achieving these ends.