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This platform already exists, and it's called Github. I recommend adapting commercial solutions, and not bothering with specialized projects like this. Serious
by jonstokes 12y ago
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 12y agoMost 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 12y agoActually Google Docs has version control with single keystroke granularity http://features.jsomers.net/how-i-reverse-engineered-google-docs/ http://features.jsomers.net/how-i-reverse-engineered-google-... 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 12y agoA 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!
- pc2g4d 12y agoDifferent problem domains. Collaborative annotation + canonical digital citations is an important use case that GitHub simply isn't aimed at.
- todrobbins 12y agoThanks for your perspective on this! I'm in the middle of your digital humanities lecture to which you linked. The criticism of the revolving grad student door is apt, hopefully OKFN can help overcome some of the previous shortcomings of the academy ipso facto.