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

Wed Feb 20 07:13:22 UTC 2013

Hey Abel,

Sounds like a cool project. Among other places, I'd suggest you look into the following:

More great code:
http://annotateit.org/

Community
http://iannotate.org/attendees.html
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/annotator-dev

Collaborators @Harvard:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/09/h20

Best of luck going forward. Holler if we can help and join the annotator Dev list if you want to get a bit more technical with your questions.

Cheers,
Andrew

On Feb 14, 2013, at 11:50 AM, Abel Corver <acorver at college.harvard.edu> wrote:

> 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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