[humanities-dev] Possible extensions of Textus; Looking for collaborators

[Abel Corver]

Hi everyone,

For some time I've been working on an online project that will allow people
to collaboratively research sources relating to government policies, as
well as related documents. These sources could range from UN resolutions,
ICJ decisions, World Bank reports, government legislative records,
etcetera. Furthermore, all annotations, highlights, etc., will be open to
all other viewers.

The system will support highlighting, annotation, but most importantly the
linking of 'evidence' in source A - e.g. a report by the Congressional
Research Service - to a 'claim' in source B - e.g. a speech by a
politician. Other viewers will be able to vote on the quality of these
'links'.

A new visitor of the website will thus get a good picture of the accuracy
of certain sources, and can easily access the 'supporting' sources if
he/she is interested.

Until now I was unaware of Textus, and I'm excited that there seems to be a
lot of overlap with my project. A number of things that I would be
interested in adding are:

- Support for source formats other than text, i.e. PDF (I'm already working
on a free pdf-to-html conversion server), HTML, Audio, Video

- Automatic indexing and conversion of large databases of documents and
reports from governments, international organizations like the UN, Red
Cross, IMF, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, news articles,
public books (e.g. Google Books, Gutenberg), etc.

- a voting and search mechanism to prevent an overload of links &
annotations for the user.

- support for news articles, and possibly integration with the browser so
that if a user visits a news website, annotations are automatically
displayed.

Could these features be built on top of Textus? Or would it be more
appropriate to make this into a completely seperate platform?

Are any of you interested in participating?

I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

Best,
Abel Corver.

P.S. A work-in-progress wiki can be found here:
http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~ibtp/devwiki/
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