The ARCHway Software Infrastructure: a Demo of a Platform and Utilities for Building Applications for Electronic Editions

As advocated in our paper (Jaromczyk & Bodapati), the
Eclipse platform (Eclipse Platform Technical Overview)
is a suitable choice for building complex systems in
environments that involve interdisciplinary collaboration and
the involvement of researchers and students at different levels.
Eclipse provides a universal tool platform (Eclipse) which
allows different software tools to work together using a plugin
system to form an integrated whole. This architecture underlies
the Edition Production Technology (Kiernan et al.), an
integrated set of tools for creating, managing, and viewing
image-based electronic editions (IBEEs) (Dekhtyar et al.). In
order to provide more comprehensive and integrated support
for the needs of editors and students of electronic editions, we
provide an additional, task-oriented, infrastructure which
provides functionality for extending Eclipse to support tasks
for editing electronic editions.
In this demonstration, we will present several pieces of this
infrastructure. The infrastructure includes support for
management of resources essential for humanities scholars
interested in electronic editions, and a uniform structure for
accessing and combining transcripts, concurrent XML
documents, and images. It is designed to accommodate the
varying needs of editors and allows for specializations ranging
from simple adaptation through the graphical user interface
(GUI), to medium-level changes based on XML configuration
files and wizards, and finally to advanced customization by
developing new plugins in Java. As such, it is intended to meet
needs of individual scholars or large groups.
The infrastructure we present consists of a number of parts,
organized into layers. The lowest layer, sitting directly atop
Eclipse, is the Data Layer, a framework for uniform access to
resources in different physical locations such as filesystems,
databases, and web servers. Above the Data Layer is the Project
Explorer, a tool for modelling resources and projects for IBEEs
and navigating those models. Making use of both the Data
Layer and the Project Explorer is the Resource Registry, which
organizes collections of resources according to user-defined
criteria. Finally, higher-level components of the EPT use these
tools as a framework for managing and organizing the data in
an image-based electronic edition.
This demonstration will present the infrastructure and show
how it fits into the general architecture of the EPT. We will
furthermore give examples illustrating how the tools can be
customized. We demonstrate the use of the Project Explorer to
create, manage, and navigate electronic edition projects,
accessing both local and remote data sources through the Data
Layer. We will also show how the Project Explorer’s
model-based approach to projects allows for highly
customizable views of the structure of an electronic edition. In
particular, the Resource Registry contributes a model of the
contents of a project that can be changed on the fly at runtime.
In addition to this infrastructure, we will present tools which
make use of the infrastructure to help editors produce electronic
editions. The Line Tracer allows editors to annotate (mark up)
images in an electronic edition, using a model based on the
segment tree data structure (Dekhtyar et al.; Jaromczyk &
Moore) that provides a natural support for the concurrent XML
based on image tagging. Another tool, the Image Morpher,
works with the Line Tracer and Resource Registry to re-morph
manuscript pages, correcting deformations of the lines of text
introduced by centuries of wear and tear.
The demo will focus on illustrating how the implemented
infrastructure can be customized to meet a broad range of needs
related to individual and collaborative work on electronic
editions.
Bibliography
Dekhtyar, Alex, et al. "Database Support for Image-based
Electronic Editions." Proceedings, 10th International
Workshop on Multimedia Information Systems (MIS 2004).
College Park, MD, August 25-27, 2004. 147-156.
Eclipse. Accessed 2004-10-11. <http://www.eclipse
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International, Inc. Last modified Feb. 2003. Accessed
2005-04-12. <http://www.eclipse.org/whitepap
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Jaromczyk, Jerzy W., and Sandeep Bodapati. "An Architecture
Promoting Collaborative Research, Teaching, and Learning." Proceedings, Joint International Conference of the Association
for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for
Literary and Linguistic Computing. Athens, GA, May 29-June
2, 2003. 10.
Jaromczyk, Jerzy W., and Neil Moore. "Geometric data
structures for multihierarchical XML tagging of manuscripts."
Proceedings, 20th European Workshop on Computational
Geometry. Seville, Spain, 2004. Accessed 2005-04-14. <htt
p://www.us.es/ewcg04/Articulos/jaromczyk.
ps>
Kiernan, Kevin, Jerzy W. Jaromczyk, Dekhtyar, Alex et al.,
Dorothy Carr Porter, Kenneth Hawley, Sandeep Bodapati, and
Ionut Emil Iacob. "The ARCHway Project: Architecture for
Research in Computing for Humanities through Research,
Teaching, and Learning." Literary and Linguistic Computing,
2005 (Forthcoming). Special issue, papers from Joint
International Conference of the Association for Computers and
the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic
Computing, 2003.