

Textus: An open-source platform for collaborating around collections of texts - walterbell
http://textusproject.org

======
jonstokes
This platform already exists, and it's called Github. I recommend adapting
commercial solutions, and not bothering with specialized projects like this.

Seriously, I spent a lot of time on this "digital humanities" (how I hate the
term) stuff in the latter part of the last decade, and I came away from it
with one major takeaway: when the grad students who are working on and
advocating for a DH project move on to their next gig, then it's up to a
professor or two to constantly recruit the next generation of grad students to
replace them and make this piece of software Their Thing that they can put on
a CV and get tenure with. But it never really pans out, even if there's some
money behind it, because if you want to stand out in academia and move up then
you have to do Your Own Thing and not Somebody Else's Thing.

Making matters much worse if the fact that few professors outside of CS
departments are equipped to understand why what you're doing is The Future and
you deserve to be hired into a humanities department for it. And to the profs
within a CS Dept., it's really clear that while what you're doing may matter
for the humanities you're not solving a Hard Computing Problem so shop it
somewhere else please. So the project eventually goes in the archives, or
becomes open-source abandonware. But one or two cohorts of grade students get
a few journal articles out of it in specialized DH organs that nobody reads,
so all is not totally lost.

What I'm describing here is endemic to the academy, so it's not like you can
fix it by waving the "open source" wand over a project, or throwing money at
it.

Anyway, I won't ramble more because I once gave a talk on this topic called
"Why Most Digital Humanities Computing Projects are a Waste of Time". You can
see it on YouTube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OeC8qGT8DI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OeC8qGT8DI)

Again, the TL;DR is this: if you want to collaborate and annotate texts with
the ability to cite specific versions, track changes, etc., then use a
commercial or open-source version control platform that is actively
maintained.

~~~
gsnedders
Most off the shelf VCSes are designed primarily for code — and line-based code
at that. Look at the revision tracking support in Word or Google Docs — it's
_character_ based. That's what we really need some decent tool and hosting
for, with stable URLs, that can be relied on. Arguably Word is better than
Google Docs for this, as its revision tracking ultimately goes into one of the
better defined parts of OOXML. (Last I looked LibreOffice was pretty poor for
this, but I haven't looked all too often.)

Still, I'm unaware of any VCS that actually does half of what many of people
want to do — in diachronic linguistics you often have to deal with variation
in source texts that /isn't/ semantically important (Romeo & Juliet v. Romeo &
Iuliet, for example), and then doing n-way diffs between various copies of the
"same" text. You don't want every single i/j or u/v to be flagged up, because
the signal:noise ratio would be astronomical. Lots of different groups have
lots of very subtly different requirements, and basically nothing off-the-
shelf works well.

~~~
pmontra
Actually Google Docs has version control with single keystroke granularity
[http://features.jsomers.net/how-i-reverse-engineered-
google-...](http://features.jsomers.net/how-i-reverse-engineered-google-docs/)
but they don't expose it with a UI. That was discussed on HN time ago.
Etherpad probably has something very similar built in.

However I don't know of anything with the advanced functionalities you
describe.

~~~
gsnedders
A lot of academics are using tools long since abandoned by their authors
(typically because they were written on a research grant, and maintenance
doesn't lead to publications, so only bugs that effect their ongoing research
ever have any chance of getting fixed) for things like the above. I know
several people who have old machines running Mac OS 9 for stuff like this!

------
pmontra
The blog ends on October 2012 and the latest commit is from December 2013. Are
there more recent news about the project and/or is this post related to some
forthcoming releases?

Edit: I found [https://github.com/okfn/textus-
viewer](https://github.com/okfn/textus-viewer) and
[https://github.com/okfn/textus-wordpress](https://github.com/okfn/textus-
wordpress) from 2014 so somebody is still working on it.

------
orjan
How does this relate to what the team at hypothes.is
([http://hypothes.is/](http://hypothes.is/)) are trying to achieve?

Textus are targeting text, hypothes.is are "building an open platform for the
collaborative evaluation of knowledge" \-- i.e. annotating the web.

~~~
walterbell
A recent comment by Rufus Pollock, [https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-
humanities/2015-Februa...](https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-
humanities/2015-February/000748.html)

 _" Re other Open Annotation, we obviously are very excited about annotatorjs
(which we created) and hypothes.is. I would reiterate that for static texts in
the Textus structure, the whole point is you can do annotation in a much
easier and nicer way (you don't need to run off addressing into the DOM) and
that's what Textus' viewer takes advantage of. _"

------
todrobbins
I work on this project and the current URL is:
[http://okfnlabs.org/textus/](http://okfnlabs.org/textus/)

We're in the process of migrating some of the older content to this URL and
would love any interested parties to contribute their skills.

