0.30 As transparent as infrastructure: on the research of  (Page 12/13)

CETH meetings. Susan Hockey, when she was Director of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH) at Princeton/Rutgers, organized two meetings to develop a coalition, similar to the TEI, to develop the next-generation tool. As Hockey explained in a post to HUMANIST,

For some time, those of us active in humanities computing have felt the need for better and/or more widely accessible text analysis software tools for the humanities. There have been informal discussions about this at a number of meetings, but so far no substantial long-term plan has emerged to clarify exactly what those needs are and to identify what could to be done to ensure that humanities scholars have readily-available text analysis tools to serve their computing needs into the next century. Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 10, No. 54. (External Link) .

Much of the discussion, of which I was part, circled around the question of whether we wanted to develop a “garden variety” tool that, like a word processor, could be installed and used by our colleagues easily. The emphasis of this model was on personal computing, ease of use, and a general feature set developed following a needs analysis. In short, what was imagined was a TACT for Windows that was capable of using TEI markup and was so easy to use that we could convert our colleagues. Some of us argued for a web-centric and modular alternative, an alternative that was taken seriously, but what matters here is this vision of what would have been personal analysis software infrastructure. But there was also a second model at work, and that was an organizational model of an international grouping that would plan and develop one universally useful tool. Alas, the project never went anywhere—the time for academic PC tool development had been bypassed by the popularity of the web.

TAPORware input and output screens

TAPoR and TAPoRware. Building on HyperPo, a project Stéfan Sinclair had for a web-based analytical tool, a bunch of us developed a proposal for CFI to develop a Text Analysis Portal for Research, which was funded in 2002. HyperPo is still running (on a TAPoR server) at (External Link) . In many ways it has been superceded by Voyeur, which is also being developed by Sinclair. TAPoR as a CFI infrastructure project developed all sorts of infrastructure, including text databases, servers and labs at six Canadian universities. Two important components were the TAPoR portal and a set of reference tools, TAPoRware. The portal is available at (External Link) . It is currently being moved to the University of Alberta and installed on an High-Performance Computing installation here (another form of infrastructure). TAPoRware is at (External Link) and (External Link) . TAPoRware, as used as it is, is being replaced by Voyeur, which is meant to scale and offer more functionality. The model was that there should be a portal that allowed people to discover and use tools that could be registered by developers as web services running elsewhere. The portal would give access to a broad collection of atomic tools that could run over the web. It was a deliberate experiment in cyberinfrastructure, as CFI was funding it and they valued innovation. The portal would be a broadly accessible web infrastructure that would encourage research and development of tools by others which could then be “published” through the portal. The portal was built on contract by the professional programmers of Open Sky Solutions in close dialogue with us. Parts of the model worked and parts didn’t. The TAPoRware tools are used around the world, but the portal is complex and clumsy and is therefore being reinvented. Web services aren’t as reliable as they should be and users want simplicity and reliability. My point here is that the model was to keep tool development as research but make the research tools easy to discover and use through portal-like infrastructure. A further paradigm was that tools could be embedded in online texts as small viral badges, thereby hiding the portal and foregrounding the visible text, an experiment we are just embarking on.