Great news! Juxta is at the center of a new partnership agreement between NINES and the Modernist Versions Project (MVP). The agreement provides the MVP with programming support to integrate Juxta with a digital environment for collating and comparing modernist texts that exist in multiple textual variants. The MVP, a project based at the University of Victoria, will enjoy full access to the Juxta collation software, including the existing stand-alone application and the web service now under development. The MVP is expected to provide a robust environment for testing and enhancing both versions of Juxta.

Posted in Digital Humanities

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September 13th, 2011

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kristin

Juxta v1.6 is now available from the download page!

New features:

• Building on Juxta’s existing support for <add>, <del>, <addspan>, and <delspan> tags, Juxta v1.6 now allows you to control the collation of revision sites by accepting or rejecting additions and deletions to the witness text.
• The contents of TEI <note> tags now display in the right column of the Document Panel and are excluded from the text collation.
• Default XML parsing templates are provided for TEI files. As in Juxta v1.4, you can customize these templates or create new ones.
• A new edit window allows you to make changes to a witness text and save the altered version as a new witness.

This development was made possible by the support of the Carolingian Canon Law project at the University of Kentucky.

Posted in Uncategorized

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August 11th, 2011

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kristin

On July 11-12, 2011, a group of Juxta users and collaborators met at the offices of Performant Software Solutions LLC in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia. The group included Abigail Firey of the Carolingian Canon Law Project at the University of Kentucky; Gregor Middell of Universität Würzburg; Ronald Dekker from the Huygen Institute; Jim Smith from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH); Dana Wheeles and Alex Gil of NINES; and Nick Laiacona and Lou Foster from Performant Software. The group previewed new features available in Juxta 1.6 (including changes to revision site display and TEI note tag support), then worked on planning for Juxta WS 1.0, the Juxta web service now in development.

Ronald, Gregor, Lou, and Jim's Laptop

Abigail Firey and Alex Gil spoke about what the developers of Juxta could learn in general from considering the particular needs of their textual projects. Jim Smith gave a presentation on Corpora Space Architecture. Gregor Middell and Ronald Dekker spoke about their work on CollateX. Gregor talked about using an offset range model of text markup; Ronald spoke about the Gothenburg abstract model for collation. Lou Foster presented the features new to Juxta 1.6. Finally, Gregor, Ronald, Jim, Lou, and Nick put their heads together in hacking sessions to work on offset ranges, the Gothenburg pipeline model, and the Juxta web service.

You can read notes from Juxta Camp on the Juxta wiki.

Posted in Uncategorized

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August 1st, 2011

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kristin

Juxta v1.4 is now available in the files area!

In addition to importing UTF-8 encoded plain text files, this new version of Juxta now supports direct import of XML source files in any well-formed schema, include TEI p4 and p5. No more preparing specialized versions of your witnesses for import into Juxta. Just import them and instantly start collating and learning things about your texts! You can configure how Juxta parses the tags it encounters. It can either include them in the reading copy, exclude them, or collate the tag type. For example if <b> changes to <i> for the same word across different witnesses, Juxta can help you detect this move. Complete details are in the online documentation on this website.

Other new features include:

• The ability to pick a target XPath from which to read a document from an XML file.
• The user can now easily examine the XML source of a difference and compare the XML of the source and the witness.
• Support for <add> <del> <addspan> and <delspan> TEI tags. These marks are now visible in the presentation of the document.
• Automatically reads bibliographic data of TEI XML sources.
• XML source files contained in the JXT file can now be exported by the user.
• User can now take a screen shot of the currently displayed comparison.
• The display font and font size are now configurable.

This development was made possible by the support of the SHANTI group at the University of Virginia.

Posted in Development

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September 23rd, 2010

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Nick

Good news!  Google has offered its support to help us develop Juxta into a web application:

googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-commitment-to-digital-humanities.html

We are thrilled to have received this competitive award, and look forward to working to optimize Juxta for the web.

Here is an abstract of our application for the Google Award:

With the support of a Google Digital Humanities Research Award, we propose to transform Juxta into a web-based application integrated with Google Books. Scholars could use such a tool to track changes in language over time and to test literary and historical theories through comparative analysis of texts.

As the largest single part of the general remediation of the global library to digital formats, the 12,000,000+ books digitized by Google represent a major opportunity for scholars interested in the history of texts and editions. We want to know how Charles Dickens and Henry James changed their novels as they went through different editions in their lifetimes; and we also want to see the changes introduced by later editors, in later printings.  We want to collate versions of poems published by Sylvia Plath and Walt Whitman to discover their revisions.  We want to compare digital texts of uncertain origin with known versions, as a mode of authentication.

Using Juxta, a scholar can answer these questions and many more. Juxta comes with several kinds of analytic visualizations. The primary collation gives a split frame comparison of a base text with a witness text, along with a display of the digital images from which the base text is derived. Juxta displays a heat map of all textual variants and allows the user to locate all witness variations from the base text. The histogram visualization displays the density of all variation from the base text and serves as a useful finding aid for specific variants.

A web based Juxta would be very similar in function to the Juxta desktop application. Scholars could upload texts into a private storage area and compare them against books from the Google Books corpus. The scholar could also embed the collation into their own website (as with Google Maps) with an HTML code snippet that we will generate. Our goal would be to eventually integrate Juxta directly into the Google Books interface, allowing scholars to compare any two books for which they have access to the full text.

Posted in Development

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July 14th, 2010

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ams4k