ITR - The ARCHway Project

The ARCHway Project (Architecture for Research in Computing for the Humanities through collaborative research, teaching, and learning) will institute a technological infrastructure, an Edition Production Technology (EPT), for collaborative work at all levels between computer science and humanities disciplines to identify and solve problems of mutual importance in building image-based electronic editions of significant cultural materials. We will develop the EPT to implement and integrate both new and already available software applications, to construct a digital library of previously unedited Old English manuscripts as a testbed for our solutions, and to distribute the digital library to the public. We will design formal methodologies for collaborative teaching and research, based on our practical goals. We will maintain an open-standards architecture with modular, extensible, interoperable components to coordinate research and development of novel methods, tools, and associated technologies. The EPT will guide the definition and coordination of well-encapsulated collaborative student projects using our testbed from semester to semester, student to student, year to year. The PIs will lead teams of students in both disciplines in focussed research projects related to documenting, editing, storing, accessing, searching, and disseminating digital libraries of image-based electronic editions. ARCHway will produce a system for building digital libraries of image-based scholarly editions for the humanities. This system will be used to produce electronic editions of a number of previously unedited Old English manuscripts. The research results of this project will lay the groundwork for sophisticated technical tools to interpret, assemble, disseminate, and maintain image-based scholarly editions on a continuing basis.