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

Wed Feb 20 10:04:03 UTC 2013

Dear Abel,

Wow this is so exciting!

I'm sure many of the features that you mention above could be built on top
of the existing TEXTUS codebase. If you haven't already do check out the
TEXTUS documentation:
https://github.com/OpenHumanities/textus/tree/master/docs

It would be great to discuss your ideas further on our weekly Open
Humanities Hangout. There are often devs there working on similar projects
who should be able to help you and get to grips with the feasibility of
building what you want on top of TEXTUS.

The Hangouts take place virtually at 5pm GMT every Wednesday.

Does that sound like something you would be able to join?

All the best,
Sam

On 14 February 2013 19:50, 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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-- 
Sam Leon
Project Manager
Open Knowledge Foundation
http://okfn.org/
Skype: samedleon
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