News
May 07, 2012
The core TAPAS team met again, this time at a meeting hosted by SHANTI at the University of Virginia’s, on April 25 - 27. While there, members of the team had fruitful interactions with staff from the Scholar’s Lab and from NINES, but the bulk of the time was spent on conducting virtual focus group meetings to get reactions from the greater TAPAS community to a draft of user interface wireframes. The draft, which was organized into three scenarios describing the reading and management interfaces for TAPAS, was circulated to focus group participants in advance of the meeting.
We’ve decided to provided a copy of this draft as a part of this report: click here to take a look. Comments on this draft are welcome; please email them to info@tapasproject.org
In all, we held eleven focus group discussions with ten institutions. One was a face-to-face interview at the University of Virginia and the other interviews were held within a virtual environment. We took extensive notes during the interviews and have summarized the primary issue with some preliminary thoughts about how to address them in this document. Several members of the TAPAS team also began revising the wireframes based on this feedback and developing a glossary of terms to be used in TAPAS. Copies of these documents will soon be posted to this site.
Our next face-to-face meeting will be at Wheaton College and will probably take place in September 2012.
Our thanks to everyone who participated in the focus group discussions. We found this meeting to be extremely productive and could not have done it without all of your help. March 09, 2012
The core TAPAS team met at Wheaton College from January 11th through the 13th for the first of four development meetings funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant. The goal of this initial meeting was to develop a skeletal paper prototype of the TAPAS application on the basis of our prior work on user stories and functional requirements, and to produce a concrete framework that would help a developer begin the work of actual coding.
In preparation for the meeting, we created an initial set of user stories and planned a series of focused exercises that would transform this list of abstract user requirements into a series of more or less concrete application visualizations. Through a collaborative process, these user stories—with additions during the course of the meeting—were numbered, printed on individual pieces of paper, and then sorted into groups representing functional areas. We then discussed each area in turn to get a more precise sense of its scope and priority within the current development effort, noting that some TAPAS features will need to be deferred until the next phase of funding. Finally, we considered each story and where necessary fleshed it out or translated it into a specific software function that could be mapped onto a wireframe. In some cases, stories were merged or moved around as our discussion revealed unseen dimensions of the information flow or user interactions.
During this phase, a number of interesting and useful discussions arose regarding the implicit assumptions and models that we each were bring to the project. For example, how many different kinds of entities does TAPAS need to provide for in its authorization model? Do we envision “individuals”, “projects”, and “organizations” or is this too complex? To what extent can we assume that relevant metadata will live inside the TEI document, and to what extent should it be maintained in separate metadata records?
In the final part of the meeting, we created a set of abstract wireframes for each functional area of the TAPAS site and service. This process was extremely useful in revealing assumptions about both work processes and information models, some of which will require further attention and input from the TAPAS community as we continue to develop the service.
Following the meeting, members of the group are producing a more polished set of wireframes with an accompanying narrative which we will share with the TAPAS community. At that stage we will be seeking feedback on some ideas and assumptions about the service, so please stay tuned! March 07, 2012
The TAPAS project received a $50,000 grant from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a User Experience for TAPAS. The grant will fund a series of workshops between January and December 2012 to develop and test a prototype interface for TAPAS. The first meeting already took place at Wheaton College in January (watch this space for a report coming soon) and the next meeting is scheduled for April at the University of Virginia. Librarians and technologists from several institutions are participating in this effort, including Brown University, Hamilton College, Willamette University, Wheaton College, and the SHANTI project at the University of Virginia.
The Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) is an office within the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The primary mission of the ODH is to help coordinate the NEH's efforts in the area of digital scholarship. The ODH works not only with NEH staff and members of the scholarly community, but also facilitates conversations with other funding bodies both in the United States and abroad so that we can work towards meeting these challenges. To learn more, please visit http://www.neh.gov/ODH/. February 28, 2012
On February 10, 2012, TAPAS announced its first call for beta-testers and contributors of test data to help us test early versions of the service.
In the first year, our goal is to permit contributors to upload TEI files and associated data to a Fedora repository, create metadata, and perform basic file management. Here’s how beta-testers and test contributors can help:
1. In summer 2012, we will be developing the ingestion interface through which TEI data can be submitted to TAPAS. We’ll be looking for feedback on usability and required features, as well as basic information about your TEI data.
2. In fall 2012, we will be testing the submission and ingestion interface. We will need test contributors with TEI data willing to upload it to TAPAS and tell us how we can improve the process.
3. In late summer and early fall 2012, we will be working on documentation and will need readers who can help us identify areas that need explanation, and help us clarify difficult points.
4. Throughout the development process, we'll be glad of thoughtful test users of all kinds interested in being part of a "virtual focus group."
We welcome participants willing to help with any or all of these activities. Even if you don’t have any TEI data right now, but will have some soon, we would be glad to hear from you. And if you'd just like to be kept on our mailing list for when we start recruiting TAPAS members, you can sign up for that as well.
A few caveats are important here. Our long-term goal is to provide a fully functional repository and publishing service for TEI data. However, in this phase of the project we are building and testing the service in a very preliminary way. Data contributed by beta-testers will be used for testing purposes to help us develop schemas, stylesheets, and interface features, but we cannot make any guarantees about functionality, long-term storage, or anything else at this early stage. Test data and projects will be visible (and visibly thanked!) on the TAPAS site.
To express your interest, please register here: http://bit.ly/ufjOFO January 20, 2012
Julia Flanders will be giving a presentation titled “Small TEI Projects on a Large Scale: TAPAS” at a Digital Dialogue at MITH on February 7, 2012. A video of the event will be published at the MITH site for those interested in learning more.
Edited to add: Unfortunately this presentation was postponed because of illness. It will be rescheduled for a later time.
January 20, 2012
Interested in joining the TAPAS development team? The Brown University Library and the TAPAS Project are seeking a developer to lead the technical implementation of the TAPAS service. Working with other members of the Brown Digital Repository development team, the developer will install and customize an instance of Islandora (Drupal and Fedora), and will develop functionality for publishing, describing, analyzing, visualizing, and sharing scholarly texts. The developer will collaborate with Brown systems and development staff, staff at Wheaton College, and other TAPAS participants, to create, refine, and implement ideas for building the service, and will work with those groups to test and roll out new web applications. Additionally, the developer will customize Drupal and the underlying Fedora repository to enable a broad set of interactions to support the publication of encoded texts, and will develop an API to provide programmatic access to TAPAS data.
Qualifications:
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent education and experience
2-5 years of demonstrated experience and proficiency planning, developing, and maintaining web sites and back-end systems.
Substantial experience with PHP; Drupal experience strongly preferred.
Familiarity with XML, XSLT, Solr, and Fedora Commons desirable.
Experience developing web applications using APIs and web services.
Familiarity with TEI & common metadata standards (e.g., MODS, Dublin Core) desirable
Strong interpersonal skills; ability to work successfully as part of a distributed team.
This is a 2-year full time position with the possibility of renewal, contingent on funding. We are also willing to consider part time work arrangements.
To apply for this position (JOB# B01380), please visit Brown’s Online Employment website (careers.brown.edu), complete an application online, attach documents, and submit for immediate consideration. Documents should include cover letter, resume, and the names and e-mail addresses of three references. Review of applications will continue until the position is filled.
Brown University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer October 12, 2011
Providence, RI – TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS), a digital humanities collaboration between the libraries of Brown University and Wheaton College, has been awarded a $250,000 National Leadership Grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), to begin on December 1, 2011 and run for three years. The goal of TAPAS is to create a shared repository and a suite of publishing and preservation services for humanities scholars who are creating digital research materials using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines.
TEI encoding offers both scholars and readers significantly richer options for annotating, searching, linking, and using digital texts. However, creating, preserving, and providing access to a TEI-encoded text can be very costly, and requires technologies and expertise that are not widely available, especially at smaller institutions. TAPAS is a community-driven, contributory project, committed to open access and open-source tools and approaches for publishing and archiving. It will enable scholars to share data and interface tools with one another and with the public. The resulting archive will permit broad access and support third-party interface development.
As Andrew Ashton, Director of Digital Technologies, Brown University Library stated “TAPAS addresses the immediate needs of humanities scholars by storing and publishing their work, but it also provides a new venue for scholars working with TEI to share, discuss, and collaborate around that work.” TAPAS will add a new dimension to Brown’s text encoding initiatives, pairing Brown’s technical expertise in digital repositories with emerging developments in web publishing and data representation. By exploring the intersection of digital collections with web frameworks such as Drupal, the TAPAS group expects to develop a substantial body of highly transferable tools and knowledge. In July, the TAPAS project received an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to fund initial user interface design. This new IMLS grant will enable large-scale infrastructure development to make TAPAS a reality.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development. To learn more about the Institute, please visit imls.gov
