Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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as the po<strong>in</strong>t of entry to the VRE and provide access to both exist<strong>in</strong>g and new tools. 775 TextGrid is
solicit<strong>in</strong>g cont<strong>in</strong>uous feedback on the TextGrid laboratory <strong>in</strong> order to improve it, add new tools, and
address <strong>in</strong>terface issues. A beta version of TextGrid laboratory can be downloaded. 776
The TextGrid project has published extensively on their work, and that literature is briefly reviewed
here. TextGrid’s <strong>in</strong>itial audience was philologists, and their early work established a “community grid
for the collaborative edit<strong>in</strong>g, annotation, analysis, and publication of specialist texts” (Aschenbrenner
et al. 2009). Initial research conducted by TextGrid largely focused on this aspect (Dimitriadis et al.
2006, Gietz et al. 2006) of the project, particularly <strong>in</strong> the development of philological editions and
services for scholars. More recent research by the TextGrid group has presented detailed <strong>in</strong>formation
on the technical architecture of the project and how it relates to the larger world of eHumanities and
cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure (Aschenbrenner et al. 2009, Ludwig and Küster 2008, Ziel<strong>in</strong>ski et al. 2009).
The creators of TextGrid ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong> that <strong>in</strong> the humanities, the key resources are data, “knowledge about
data,” and services, and that the challenge is to process and connect these resources (Aschenbrenner et
al. 2009). The <strong>in</strong>tellectual content and the community that uses it are at the core of TextGrid. While the
majority of content with<strong>in</strong> TextGrid will be textual, image resources have also been provided by a
number of German <strong>in</strong>stitutions, and these two resources will be merged <strong>in</strong>to a “virtual library” us<strong>in</strong>g
the Globus toolkit grid <strong>in</strong>frastructure. This will allow TextGrid to provide seamless search<strong>in</strong>g over
federated archives while still allow<strong>in</strong>g the data to rema<strong>in</strong> distributed and support<strong>in</strong>g the addition of
new organizations (Ludwig and Küster 2008). The authors also discussed the difficulties of creat<strong>in</strong>g
digital content that will need to be used and preserved for a time that will outlast any system design:
Furthermore, the typical project duration of eHumanities projects and <strong>in</strong> particular that for the
elaboration of critical editions, academic dictionaries and large l<strong>in</strong>guistic corpora is often
long—many years at least, often decades, sometimes even centuries. The time span dur<strong>in</strong>g
which those resources rema<strong>in</strong> pert<strong>in</strong>ent for then current research can be much longer still. In
this it by far surpasses the average lifetime of any particular generation of software technology
(Ludwig and Küster 2008).
They thus po<strong>in</strong>ted out the importance of content stability and of design<strong>in</strong>g content that can be ported
<strong>in</strong>to new systems as time passes, s<strong>in</strong>ce digital resources created will likely be used for far longer than
the <strong>in</strong>dividual services designed to use them.
TextGrid’s developers recommended creat<strong>in</strong>g an open-service environment with robust and general
services that can ultimately be used to “form the basis for value added services and, eventually, doma<strong>in</strong>
specific services and tailored applications” (Aschenbrenner et al. 2009). The creators of TextGrid thus
argued that to be successful, a digital humanities project must first create an open <strong>in</strong>frastructure with
fairly generic services while at the same time promot<strong>in</strong>g community creation of specialized
applications and workflows that can motivate community participation and greater uptake. In fact,
active community build<strong>in</strong>g has been one of TextGrid’s most dynamic tasks dur<strong>in</strong>g both project design
and development, and they have designed specific documentation and communication for their three
<strong>in</strong>tended user groups (i.e., visitors/users, data providers, and tool developers).
TextGrid has designed a service oriented architecture <strong>in</strong> multiple layers: (1) the application
environment or TextGrid access po<strong>in</strong>t that is Eclipse based and geared towards philologists; (2)
775 http://www.textgrid.de/en/ueber-textgrid.html
776 http://www.textgrid.de/en/beta.html