A little while ago I posted some ideas for a project called OpenPhilosophy.org, which would enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create collections of philosophical texts which have entered the public domain.

I’m very excited to say that the project has secured some funding from JISC, who champion digital technology for use in higher education in the UK. The project will be a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, the University of Oxford and the Open Knowledge Foundation. It will also involve students and staff at other institutions in the UK and further afield.

The project will develop an open source platform called TEXTUS, which will enable users to create, manage and interact with collections of texts. TEXTUS will power OpenPhilosophy.org. The platform will be developed with input from students and staff who will be using OpenPhilosophy.org in their teaching and research. It will have a strong emphasis on creating something beautiful, simple, intuitive and user-centric.

It will benefit from the wisdom of a distinguished Advisory Board of philosophy professors and digital humanities experts, which currently includes:

• Frederick Beiser, Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University
• Tobias Blanke, Head of the Centre for e-Research at King’s College London
• David Bourget, Director of the Centre for Computing in Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London
• Andrew Bowie, Professor of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway, University of London
• Dan Cohen, Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University
• Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at New School for Social Research, New York and Editor of The Stone philosophy forum at the New York Times
• Manuel Dries, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oxford
• Christian J. Emden, Associate Professor in German Studies at Rice University
• Stefan Gradmann, Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Kenneth Haynes, Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics, Brown University
• Derek Matravers, Professor in Philosophy at the Open University and Lecturer at the University of Cambridge.
• Nigel Warburton, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University and Co-founder of the Philosophy Bites podcast

In the first phase of the project we will be developing a prototype of the TEXTUS platform, and sourcing and selecting public domain philosophical texts to include in OpenPhilosophy.org.

If you’d like to be kept in the loop, you can request an invite to test the project when it is ready. If you’d like to come and help out, you are warmly invited to join us on the public open-philosophy discussion list. You can also follow @OpenPhilosophy on Twitter.

Pictures of Roman Ondák’s “Table” (Berlin, 2010) by Marc Wathieu, CC-BY.

TEXTUS is an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata. It enables users to transcribe, translate, and annotate texts, and to manage associated bibliographic data.

Here’s the rationale:

The combination of freely available digital copies of public domain works, open bibliographic data and open source tools has the potential to revolutionise research in the humanities. However there are currently numerous obstacles which mean that they are often under-utilised by scholars and students in teaching and research:

• From classic literary and cultural works, to letters, drafts, notes, and other historical documents, there is a huge amount of freely available public domain material that is highly relevant to scholars and students engaged in research in the humanities. But these works can be difficult to find, difficult to work with, and works by a given author may be scattered in a variety of locations. Search results may be confusing or unclear. Automated Optical Character Recognition of texts may be inaccurate or incomplete. The metadata for the work for may be unclear and the provenance and rights status for a given digital edition may be unknown. It is not always clear how to cite passages from digital editions of public domain works.
• Over the past few years, libraries and other cultural heritage organisations have been releasing open data about works they hold. This has the potential to be a rich resource for scholars interested in building scholarly bibliographies and working with large collections of texts. While there are a growing number of tools and services for working with bibliographic data, many researchers may not know how to use these, and online bibliographies may not link through to digital copies of public domain works which are available online.
• There are a growing number of open source tools for transcribing, translating and annotating texts. However many of these are one off projects and it may not be clear how to deploy the tools in relation to a given text or collection of texts.

Here’s what it would do:

The TEXTUS platform will enable users to:

• Transcribe texts from images, PDFs or other non-machine readable sources.
• View texts and translations side by side – and create new translations of texts for use in teaching or research.
• Annotate texts, and share annotations with groups of users, or with the public.
• Curate, share and export collections of bibliographic metadata (scholarly references), including metadata associated with texts published on the platform.

Here’s a peek under the hood:

TEXTUS builds on and utilises existing best of breed open source components and software packages such as:

• Annotator – an open-source Javascript tool to enable annotations to be added to any webpage
• Bibserver – which includes numerous tools, services and standards for working with bibliographic metadata
• Open Literature – which powers OpenShakespeare, OpenMilton and other sites
• Public Domain Works – a nascent directory of works which have entered the public domain in different countries around the world
• Scripto – an open source tool that enables users to contribute transcriptions to online documentary projects
• WordPress – due to its popularity, ease of use, and extensive plugin system, TEXTUS will use WordPress as its main CMS

If you’re interested, you can join discussion on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s open-humanities mailing list.

For several years I’ve been meaning to start OpenPhilosophy.org, which would be a collection of open resources related to philosophy for use in teaching and research. There would be a focus on the history of philosophy, particularly on primary texts that have entered the public domain, and on structured data about philosophical texts.

The project could include:

• A collection of public domain philosophical texts, in their original languages. This would include so called ‘minor’ figures as well as well known thinkers. The project would bring together texts from multiple online sources – from projects like Europeana, the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg or Wikimedia Commons, to smaller online collections from libraries, archives, academic departments or individual scholars. Every edition would be rights cleared to check that it could be freely redistributed, and would be made available either under an open license, with a rights waiver or a public domain dedication.
• Translations of public domain philosophical texts, including historical translations which have entered the public domain, and more recent translations which have been released under an open license.
• Ability to lay out original texts and translations side by side – including the ability to create new translations, and to line up corresponding sections of the text.
• Ability to annotate texts, including private annotations, annotations shared with specific users or groups of users, and public annotations. This could be done using the Annotator tool.
• Ability to add and edit texts, e.g. by uploading or by importing via a URL for a text file (such as a URL from Project Gutenberg). Also ability to edit texts and track changes.
• Ability to be notified of new texts that might be of interest to you – e.g. by subscribing to certain philosophers.
• Stable URLs to cite texts and or sections of texts – including guidance on how to do this (e.g. automatically generating citation text to copy and paste in a variety of common formats).

The project could also include a basic interface for exploring and editing structured data on philosophers and philosophical works:

• Structured bibliographic data on public domain philosophical works – including title, year, publisher, publisher location, and so on. Ability to make lists of different works for different purposes, and to export bibliographic data in a variety of formats (building on existing work in this area – such as Bibliographica and related projects).
• Structured data on secondary texts, such as articles, monographs, etc. This would enable users to browse secondary works about a given text. One could conceivably show which works discuss or allude to a given section of a primary text.
• Structured data on the biographies of philosophers – including birth and death dates and other notable biographical and historical events. This could be combined with bibliographic data to give a basic sense of historical context to the texts.

Other things might include:

• User profiles – to enable people to display their affiliation and interests, and to be able to get in touch with other users who are interested in similar topics.
• Audio version of philosophical texts – such as from Librivox.
• Links to open access journal articles.
• Images and other media related to philosophy.
• Links to Wikipedia articles and other introductory material.
• Educational resources and other material that could be useful in a teaching/learning context – e.g. lecture notes, slide decks or recordings of lectures.

While there are lots of (more or less ambitious!) ideas above, the key thing would be to develop the project in conjunction with end users in philosophy departments, including undergraduate students and researchers. Having something simple that could be easily used and adopted by people who are teaching, studying or researching philosophy or other humanities disciplines would be more important that something cutting edge and experimental but less usable. Hence it would be really important to have a good, intuitive user interface and lots of ongoing feedback from users.

What do you think? Interested in helping out? Know of existing work that we could build on (e.g. bits of code or collections of texts)? Please do leave a comment below, join discussion on the open-humanities mailing list or send me an email!

In my research I often wonder about whom and what the people I’m reading read. Did Wittgenstein read Nietzsche? Did Nietzsche read Hegel? Did Hegel read Shakespeare? Did Shakespeare read Chaucer? Did Chaucer read Sophocles?

Knowing which texts a given writer was aware of (and which they probably weren’t aware of) can help us to understand them and their works better. For example, I may notice a certain idea or metaphor in a text, which reminds me of something someone else has written a hundred years before. Is it possible they knew about the earlier text? Is there evidence they were acquainted with it (directly or indirectly)? Similarly I may notice something in a text which reminds me of something which somebody said much later. Is there any evidence of influence? Is a comparison anachronistic? Did the author of the passage I’m reading know about another influential essay or tract on the same topic pubished a couple of decades earlier? Knowing what someone read gives us a sense of where they are coming from, gives us a sense of the contours of what Gadamer would call their Horizont, their ‘horizon’.

Large scale collaborative research in the humanities does not always make sense. Many academics may feel that they scarcely have time apart from teaching and admin to do their own research (writing books, etc), let alone big research projects with people with whom they do not know, and whose work may be only approximately or tangentially related to their own. Certainly people sitting on research funding councils and so on should be careful not to unreflectingly promote collaborative research models in arts and humanities disciplines from other research areas, for example in the sciences, where large scale collaboration is ubiquitous or necessary. That said, I do think that a lot of meta level activities – such as creating and maintaining comprehensive bibliographies – are more suited to being undertaken by large communities of scholars working in collaboration, rather than by lone experts in isolation. Mapping influence in intellectual history is arguably an endeavour where it is desirable to have as much input as possible from as many pairs of eyes as possible.

How might we get started? How can we enable collaboration between scholars to start systematically mapping influence between different writers? To start with we have an increasing amount of freely reusable information about authors and works, e.g. open data from the British Library, the Library of Congress and elsewhere. These can often tell us who wrote what, and the dates of publication of work, and the birth/death dates of authors. Building on this, we could create a basic tool which enable scholars to create new relations between these basic elements, and to explore those relations.

Ideally one would want to have a minimal number of these relations, and for each of these to be as well formed and unambiguous as possible, and each able to be substantiated with some kind of textual reference. E.g. rather than having ‘author X was influenced by author Y’ or ‘author X was aware of author Y’ one would want to break these down into very simple, concrete things like:

• Work A quotes from Work B
• Work A cites Work B
• Work A alludes to author X
• etc

One could even imagine using other sources (library lending data, lecture lists, reading lists, catalogues, letters, notes and other sources) to try to systematically establish things like:

• Author X corresponded with author Y
• Author X met author Y
• Author X was taught by author Y
• Author X attended lectures on author Y
• Author X possessed a copy of work A
• Author X borrowed book A from a library
• etc

This kind of tool would have to be used with a good measure of caution, to ensure one does not:

• Shoehorn one’s interpretation of influence into a certain pre-defined (and to a certain degree, arbitrary) scheme. Hence the first cluster of relations may be more solid start than the second, which are a bit more tentative.
• Take this kind of data as anything other than a very rough guide, an initial basic reference pointing scholars to further sources and citations, which should be interpreted carefully. As I blogged about recently , I don’t think guidance from digital tools will replace immersion in a given domain any time soon!

The image above is from Timothy Stotz, and shows teacher-student relationships between artists, 1435-1935

Of course new technologies may change our modus operandi, and may alter the kinds of research we do. For example the (arguably disproportionate) dominance of the monograph and the article as the sole legitimate ‘units’ of contribution to scholarship in the humanities, may be challenged as digital tools make it easier to share annotations and micro observations, and to create vibrant, dynamic, living conversations around texts and topics. Technology will make it easier for us to traffic in small things like footnotes, asides, linkages, and momentary reflections in addition to the big things, like five-hundred page theses or multi-volume Festschriften.

But I strongly suspect that many of the core virtues of scholarship will remain the same. We may have tools and technologies to help us out with things which were previously a lot more laborious such as creating comprehensive concordances, searching for the occurrence of a certain name in literary Nachlässe, collaborating more easily and more effectively and so on. Lone researchers will be able to do things which perhaps in the past could only be undertaken by large teams of researchers over decades. But these tools and technologies will predominantly be there to support the creation of interesting insights and interpretations, hypotheses and meditations, to support scholars in continuing doing things which they have been doing for centuries.

If we can compare scholarship to walking around in the countryside, then perhaps digital tools are like satellite navigation systems. They can help us plan routes and get a big picture of where we are, but they are no substitute for direct acquaintance, or years of immersion. A good scholar will still have an intimate knowledge of the landscape: which part of the river dries out in the summer, the way that that tree has grown over time, where that stile crosses the path, the way to lift the gate on its hinge to make it turn more easily, the way the path slopes down the hill, and so forth.

As someone engaged in research in the humanities I find that I am often making lists of books about particular authors, periods, and themes. A single publication will often appear in more than one list. For example, I may wish to include Frederick Beiser’s The Romantic Imperative in a list of books about Novalis, a list of books about Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, a list about the Early German Romantics, a list of books about German philosophy to be recommended to a non-specialist reader, and so on.

It is not only individual researchers who make such lists. Those who teach often create and update lists of publications for their students. Large bibliographic indexes, such as the subscription-based Philosopher’s Index, are useful references for those looking into what has been published on a given topic. Books, articles and personal websites contain lists of related or recommended publications. These can be alphabetical, or organised by subject or author. They can be annotated with comments and summaries or left alone. They can be actively curated or printed and never revisited.

Though they may be easy to overlook, lists of publications are an absolutely critical part of scholarship. They articulate the contours of a body of knowledge, and define the scope and focus of scholarly enquiry in a given domain. Furthermore such lists are always changing. Books and articles are published and translated all the time. Works fall in and out of fashion. ‘Secondary’ reference works can become obsolete – considered interesting more for what they say about a particular intellectual period than what they say about their subject matter. (As an aside: I always wanted to scan and compare reading lists from the Cambridge Philosophy Faculty Library for as far back as they exist – to get a sense of the changing zeitgeist at an influential department. Lists of publications are presumably an invaluable resource for intellectual historians!)

On beyond paper: from books to bits

Until recently bibliographies had to be compiled and printed in physical dead-tree volumes. This limited not only how often the bibliographies could be updated, but also how the items contained within them were organised. Items would have to be placed in a definite sequence, perhaps according to some rigid taxonomy. At best dead-tree bibliographies may skew the selection, presentation and ordering of works according to one of many possible interpretations of a body of scholarship. At worst they may shoehorn individual works into an arbitrary scheme so they fit the expectations and contrivances of the bibliographer. For example, for the sake of taxonomical integrity Johann Georg Hamann is classified by Jules Michelet, a nineteenth century historian, as an example of Glaubensphilosophie, a term which became popular many decades after the former’s death and which Hamann and those who knew him almost certainly wouldn’t apply to his work!

In the last few decades we have moved beyond print bibliographies and card catalogues to more fine-grained and (sometimes) more sophisticated bit-based systems. These allow lists of publications to be sorted, searched and queried in all kinds of interesting ways, and to be annotated and updated on-the-fly. For example, websites like Library Thing and Amazon allow people to create arbitrary lists of books – as well as to rate and comment on books. Software packages and services like Mendeley and Zotero allow people to manage and share collections of links, documents and sources. We are seeing the emergence of new kinds of technologies that transform the way we work with lists. One thing that the web currently seems to be very good at is allowing people to create and curate various kinds of lists – from lists of links to lists of encyclopedia topics. Lists can easily be kept near-comprehensive (but – and this is a virtue – never quite complete), very up to date, and do not have to be shoehorned into any particular pre-determined structure, unlike their paper counterparts. Diderot would have been jealous!

A case study: the genealogy of stories

Recently I was talking with my dad about his new research centre, the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy. A little while ago I proposed that a useful output of the centre could be a large multilingual, collaboratively edited bibliography (or bibliographic database) of publications related to folk tales, fairy tales and fantasy. Naturally one that would make the likes of Herder, Brentano, Arnim, and the Grimms proud! This would include:

• primary sources for fairy tales in different countries (e.g. Giambattista Basile, the Brother’s Grimm, Charles Perrault, …)
• secondary commentaries (e.g. Vladimir Propp, Jack Zipes, …)
• new literary tales and new reworkings of old tales (e.g. Ludwig Tieck, E.T.A Hoffman, George MacDonald, Italo Calvino, …)

Ideally the database would be able to give answers to questions like:

• What has been published about Giambattista Basile in German in the last 20 years?
• Which Italian folktales and fairy tales have been translated into Norwegian?
• What was published about Charles Perrault in English between 1850 and 1900?

Among other things it could be useful as a scholarly tool to compare translations, reworking and editions of particular tales – as well as as the basis for serious source criticism and comparative scholarship, looking at the transmission and influence of different tales across different regions.

I’ve been looking around to see whether there’s anything which fits the bill, but have been unable to find anything that seems quite right (if you know of anything please let me know!). Meanwhile, I’ve put together a preliminary specification for an open source web service tentatively dubbed ‘Bibliographica’ to scratch the itch. So far I’ve used the Sussex Centre project and examples from my own research to illustrate the project, but the idea would be to create something generic which could be used in lots of different domains – not just for philosophy or folktales!

Bibliographica: what lovely features you have

Overview

A list of desirable features (in no particular order):

• Free, open source and easy for for anyone to set up their own branded instance of the service at their own domain name (e.g. biblio.york.ac.uk or books.example.com)
• Easy to import and export data in a variety of common formats (including from existing online sources of open bibliographic data such as the Open Library)
• Fully versioned so that all changes to the bibliography can be tracked and, if necessary, reversed
• Allows different read/edit permissions to be assigned to different users and groups (e.g. individual researchers, research groups, …)
• Allows users to easily create their own lists of publications (e.g. for a taught course, for an article, book or thesis, …)
• Allows users to easily create new ‘record’ for a publication
• Allows users to search, sort and query records by author, title, subject matter, language, country/region of origin, date of publication, date of subject matter, and so on
• Uses existing technologies such as OpenID
• Support for arbitrary, user-generated tags of authors and works
• Well documented API
• Allows users to see which works are in the public domain in their jurisdiction (using a series of public domain calculators)
• Allows users to find digital copies of works which have fallen into the public domain – as well as links to online journal archives, library catalogues and so on

Data elements/model

This would be, to the greatest extent possible, based on and compatible with existing bibliographic data standards including MARC, FRBR and Dublin Core. Below are some rough ideas for fields that might be included. Any and all suggestions welcome in the comments below, or via email! This is intended to be a work in progress…

Author:

• ID
• First Name
• Last Name
• Date of Birth
• Date of Death
• Place of Birth
• Place of Death
• Area(s) lived in
• Country(/ies) associated with
• Which users/groups can edit (optional)

Work:

• ID
• Title
• Author
• Language
• Date of Publication
• Country/region of origin
• Country/region of subject matter
• Which users/groups can edit (optional)
• Author(s) it is about
• Subject matter (perhaps based on Library of Congress Subject Headings)
• Medium/type of work (book, article, audio recording, film, …)
• URL (if relevant)

List:

• ID
• Works in list
• Title
• Description
• Comment/annotation associated with a given work in the list
• Which users/groups can edit (optional)

User:

• ID
• User name
• Contact details
• Description (bio, links, …)
• Authors edited
• Works edited
• Lists edited

Group:

• ID
• Users
• Title
• Description