19.597 new tools

              Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 19, No. 597.
      Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                  www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                       www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                    Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

  [1] From: "Humanist Discussion Group (32)
        Subject: open-source text tool from UVic

  [2] From: "Humanist Discussion Group (34)
        Subject: 1.0 Release of the collation tool Juxta

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2006 21:28:21 -0400
        Subject: open-source text tool from UVic

Hi there,

[Apologies for cross-posting -- this is going to the tei, tapor-tech and
humanist lists.]

We've recently had to rescue some very old linguistics data, which was
stored in a combination of Lexware and DOS WordPerfect files, by
converting it to Unicode. Non-ascii characters were represented in the
data by nasty sequences of control characters used to switch between
obsolete character-sets and long-gone fonts in WordPerfect. In order to
convert the data, we had to create and test a huge sequence of
search-and-replace operations which would find these strings and replace
them with the correct Unicode codepoints for IPA characters.

To make this process easier for ourselves, we've created a Windows app
called Transformer, which enables you to create, organize and test
sequences of search/replace operations (including regular expressions),
then run them in batch mode on a set of files. We're releasing it as
open-source under the MPL 1.1, and the site for it is here:

<http://www.tapor.uvic.ca/~mholmes/transformer/>

It shares some of its code base with the Image Markup Tool which was
released in alpha in December; this tool is further along in its
development, and is officially a beta, with only a few enhancements
planned before the final release.

Please check it out if you have a need for something like this, and feel
free to cross-post this announcement to any other lists.

All the best,
Martin

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes_at_uvic.ca)
Half-Baked Software, Inc.
(mholmes_at_halfbakedsoftware.com)
martin_at_mholmes.com
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2006 21:31:30 -0400
        Subject: 1.0 Release of the collation tool Juxta
Our development group ARP (Applied Research in Patacriticism:
www.patacriticism.org) is today releasing the 1.0 version of Juxta.
Anyone interested in online critical editing, whether theoretically or
practically or both, will probably want to look at the tool and perhaps
try it out. 
Juxta is an open source cross platform tool for comparing and collating
multiple witnesses of a single textual work.  The tool allows one to set
any of the witnesses as the base text, to add or remove witness texts,
to switch the base text at will, and to annotate the comparisons and
save the results.
Juxta comes with several kinds of analytic visualizations.  The basic
collation gives a split frame comparison of a base text and a witness
text along with a display of the digital images from which the base text
is derived.  Juxta provides a heat map of all textual variants and
allows the user to locate at the level of any textual unit all witness
variations from the base text.  A histogram of the collations is
particularly useful for long documents.  It displays the density of all
variation from the base text and serves as a useful finding aid for
specific variants.  Juxta can also output a lemmatized schedule in html
of the textual variants in any set of comparisons.
This release of the tool comes with demonstration examples from Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Shakespeare, and Walter Pater.
We've set up a blog for commentary and exchange:
http://www.patacriticism.org/juxta/
We're keen to support a user community around the software and to hear
from you about both its  successes and deficiencies.  You can download
the installer from the  following site:
http://www.patacriticism.org/juxta/download/
You may want to consult the following help page, which includes a  link
to our user manual:
http://www.patacriticism.org/juxta/help/
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.  You can write
to me or, even better, to the following: tecnologies_at_nines.org
Jerome McGann