Interedition 8th Bootcamp: 7 October - 11 October 2011

Interedition (http://www.interedition.eu) is a COST (http://www.cost.eu) funded Action whose objective is to further the interoperability of tools in digital scholarship. Interedition is raising the awareness of the importance of interoperability as a major driver for sustainability for tools and data in the field of digital scholarship. This activity takes two forms: firstly, meetings in which researchers in digital scholarship can network their knowledge of tools and avenues towards their interoperability; secondly, the development of proof-of-concept implementations of interoperable tools. These proof-of-concept tools are the focus of Interedition's periodic bootcamps, which offer the open source development community in the humanities opportunities to meet, network, and exchange knowledge.

The Bootcamp

Interedition is inviting all interested to participate in the upcoming Development Bootcamp, which will take place from 7 October to 11 October 2011 at the Universität Würzburg, coinciding with the start of the TEI-meeting (http://www.zde.uni-wuerzburg.de/tei_mm_2011/) which also takes place there. We hope thus to offer a good occasion for members of both groups to confer on the subject of interoperability. As special Think Tank for this is foreseen on 12 October, for which seperate bursaried may be acquired.

The bootcamp and think tank are organized through the kind efforts of:

•  Fotis Jannidis (Universität Würzburg)
•  Malte Rehbein (Universität Würzburg)
•  Gregor Middell (Universität Würzburg)
•  Susan Schreibman (Trinity College Dublin)

Objectives

The primary objective of the bootcamp is the development of prototypes for interoperable 'microservice' tools for textual scholarship and digital editions. Interedition's working group 3 has identified transcription and annotation of physical textual sources one of the pivotal scholarly tasks involved with creating digital editions. At the 2010 München bootcamp in less than 5 minutes more than 18 transcription & annotation related tool development projects were identified. Non of these is adhereing to any machine to machine protocol or format for interchange. All results of high quality scholarly work on transcribing and commenting within these data silos are therefor locked in and hadrly (re)useable for further scholarly processing and analysis.

Interedition wants to inspire an open source development movement around this problem of interoperabilty and invites anyone who can make a hands on contribution to a prototype distributed reference implementation of an interoperable model for text. We aim to have the participants returning to their local projects with a shared idea on how to approach text resource exchange, and GUI and back end tools to show for it. Suggested goals for the bootcamp are both models and proof of concept implementations for the following use cases:

** Use Case 1 **

** Resource discovery & Highly granular text addressing/markup **

A text repository hosts a set of marked-up texts, possibly organized in different subsets (collections). Clients access the repository via RESTful protocols, particularly via the AtomPub protocol in order to get notified about newly created or recently modified texts in the repository and/or about certain layers of markup applied to them. The client could filter those feeds based on the text collection or markup/annotation type of interest. The Atom feeds' content is constructed dynamically based on customized queries against the repositories' content and would thus augment established standards for resource discovery that usually operate on the level of curated metadata (e.g. OAI-PMH). Automatized dissemination of transcribed texts in a decentralized, loosely coupled network of repositories is thus facilitated in a manner comparable to the way in which the blogosphere functions.

** Use Case 2 **

** Text source exchange **

Use case: Texts can be replicated between repository installations and/or other datastores. The exchange includes the textual content as well as any chosen set of markup/ annotation layers associated with the text. Markup is allowed to overlap arbitrarily in the repositories own model while lossless transformation of text and markup information into XML-based encodings provides for the integration with existing tool chains. Interoperability and data interchange is thus facilitated.

** Use Case 3 **

** Transcription & Annotation workflow **

Texts can be marked-up with several independent annotation layers such that a collaborative transcription and annotation workflow becomes feasible. For example an editor could start by transcribing a text with a minimal set of markup applied. A tool for language recognition listens for new texts in the repository and as soon as the editor submit the transcript, the tool adds annotations to it identifying the language(s) present in the transcript. Then a language-specific POS tagger, listening for repository events of added language annotations processes the transcript further by adding part-of-speech tagging. Later on automatic name entity recognition might be applied to the tagged transcript and finally another editor is notified (via an Atom feed or via e-mail), that the automatically tagged transcripts is ready to be reviewed.

Bursaries

COST Action IS0704 'Interedition' is offering bursaries to early stage researchers (< Ph.D. + 10 years) and developers that want to join the bootcamp. The bursaries will consist of an 100 Euro per diem allowance and will cover travel expenses fully (limitations apply).

How to apply

If you are interested in participating in the bootcamp, please send an email to joris.van.zundert-AT-huygens.knaw.nl by **25 September 2011**. You don't need an intricate motivation, but please state your affiliation, and add a very short (certainly not more than 200 words) description of your current or related development work in digital humanities. If you partook in an earlier Interedition bootcamp, you may refer to the motiviation you provided at the time. Please note that if you do join the bootcamp, some formal paperwork will be necessary to get you the bursary - but until now all participants passed that test with flying colors.

Program

Friday 7 October

•  Introduction of participants
•  Introduction the principles of microservices
•  Introduction to the Gothenburg and Palo Alto models for distributed solutions
•  Challenge
•  Planning Game

Saturday 8 October

• Hacking

Sunday 9 October

•  Hacking
• Social event

Monday 10 October

•  Hacking

Monday 11 October

•  Hacking
•  Presentation & discussion of results
•  Write up
•  Drinks

Additional Information

If you require more information --e.g. you want to join, but are wondering about specific requirements, different arrangements, etc. etc.-- please don't hesitate to use the email address provided above. Or join us on IRC at#interedition.