About

The ability to reuse tools across projects is an increasingly important feature of many digital humanities efforts.  Researchers using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines have traditionally published to the web using processes such as XSLT transformations, which are intended to reproduce a work as an enhanced digital surrogate using HTML, PDF, or another publication format. [1]  Processes such as these often contain the complete pipeline of logic that produces a publishable product, whether the product is a document, a data set, or visualizations.  Other approaches to scholarly software design offer opportunities to enhance the reusability of scholarly software tools by breaking apart these processing pipelines into smaller, more general-purpose chunks and providing an environment to blend and align tools from different domains.  To test this approach, the Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) and the Brown University Women Writers Project (WWP) have developed a prototype suite of software tools to explore TEI encoded texts in the Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR).[2]

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[1] Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org)

[2] Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship (http://library.brown.edu/cds);

Brown University Women Writers Project (http://www.wwp.brown.edu);

The Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR,http://www.seasr.org), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is a modular, open-source software framework for text analysis and visualization.