Launched: Textual Communities

Textual Communities

We are pleased to announce today the full public release of Textual Communities. Textual Communities is an environment for the collaborative online creation of scholarly editions.

There are two public versions of Textual Communities:

·      The production version, https://textualcommunities.org

·      The sandbox version, https://textualcommunitessandbox.org

You can create your own account on the sandbox version, and experiment with it.

Textual Communities has the following distinctive features:
·      It is not an adaptation of any other system, but is built anew from the ground up;

·      It understands text as a collection of leaves distributed across a document tree and an entity tree. Accordingly, it can both present text page by page (or line by line), as parts of a document tree, and it can present text entity by entity, as a hierarchy of acts of eommunication  (hence, line 1 of the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales), as parts of an entity tree;

·      It offers powerful collation tools, CollateX and the Collation Editor, permitting precise tailoring of the collation of any entity in muliple documents;

·      It includes tools for managing collaboration: to invite, supervise and monitor multiple collaborators;

·      It includes an IIIF image server, and can create editiable documents from IIIF manifests;

·      It provides an API giving access to all materials through URI resource descriptors.

The documentation at https://wiki.usask.ca/display/TC/Textual+Communitiesoffers a “Getting Started” guide, and various other documents.

We are grateful for the support of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University of Saskatchewan.