JISC

Summary

TEXTUS will be an open source platform that helps researchers and students to collaborate around and work with collections of digitised public domain texts. It will enable users to search for, read and download public domain texts and allow them to annotate, transcribe and share these texts on an integrated online platform. An initial deployment will be made for the philosophy research community on openphilosophy.org. The platform will be developed with input from staff and students drawn from a number of British universities who will be using the tool in their research and teaching.

Objectives

TEXTUS aims to make it easy for scholars and research students to work collaboratively around public domain texts.

We hope to:

• Encourage more scholars and students to contribute to the curation of existing open digital resources;
• Catalyse the creation of high quality bibliographies around key authors and texts;
• Support real time research collaboration across institutional boundaries, with digital-first methods of working, creating an archive of the work at the same time;
• Catalyse the transcription of online texts from images and PDFs to structured text - building on the success of large user-driven projects such as Project Gutenberg or Wikimedia Commons, as well as exemplary projects such as Transcribe Bentham;
• Encourage more students and scholars to share textual annotations that they make during the course of their research.

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

• Deployment of the first instance of the TEXTUS platform on openphilosophy.org;
• Use of openphilosophy.org in exemplary research and teaching contexts.