Join us on Thursday 26th January 10.00-16.00, Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library.
Digital texts are all around us - as objects of study in scholarly work, to the news, social media and other texts we interact with everyday online. But how long will these digital texts last? The problem with digital texts is that they come in a variety of formats that are hard to reuse. Reusing and sustaining digital texts requires format and infrastructure updates beyond the skill and funding limits that most researchers can access. The Unlocking Digital Texts project aims to scope and define an Interoperable Text Format (ITF) as a means for accessing and delivering text that is stored in a variety of extant formats. Importantly, we are aiming for something that is both human- and computer-readable. If we are successful, this work will allow users to easily create, arrange, annotate, embed and share digital texts (either whole or in part) regardless of how or where they are stored.
We will be holding some workshops in the new year to explore the areas outlined in the position paper and would like to reach out to the wider community for people interested in participating. Workshops will begin with presentations on the current activities/interests of participants and then progress to a design/discussion session.
The focus of this workshop is on: Text referencing and API's, text extraction and text format conversions.
Refreshments will be provided.
If you are interested in contributing to this workshop, please contact neil.jefferies@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Further information about the project
If you are unable to join us on the 26th January, we will also be holding workshops online on 10th February and in Cambridge (UK) on 24th February. Please contact Neil Jefferies to enquire.
The project website can be found at https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/article/unlocking-digital-texts. More specific details on our approach and goals can be found in a position paper here https://osf.io/u6vb4. Project activities are managed using the Open Science Framework https://osf.io/r78gx/.