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DHQ Skunkworks

Coordinating volunteer efforts to help with development of DHQ technical infrastructure and associated technologies.

dhq-tech mailing list

Monitor skunkworks projects by joining the dhq-tech mailing list at http://lists.digitalhumanities.org/mailman/listinfo/dhq-tech.

Current and future projects

If you have an idea for a project, please alert the dhq-tech list.

Note that there's no indication here that any of these projects are currently active: this is nothing if not a scratch pad for brainstorming.

Sample documents

Our greatest need right at the moment is sample documents, marked up according to the DHQauthor tag set. Go download the Relax NG schema from Download Central and try it out.

"Finishing" stylesheets

Consult with ME and Editor in Chief (whoever is turning the crank). The idea is to semi-automate some final stages of document preparation. At time of publication, documents can be enhanced with a range of different sorts of metadata, much of which can be derived automatically or provided from boilerplate.

This is a fairly open-ended area, and includes all kinds of validation, specialized display ("false-color proofs") and gauging. Cool Tools? !

Peer review infrastructure

We will be needing

• HTML forms front-end implementation (XForms?) to XML or db back end (which?)
• Presentation / assessment XSLT stylesheets (rendering document + peer reviews)
  • with gauges such as bibliometer (showing citations), visualizations?
• Full expanded metadata rendering XSLT (for ME/editors)

TEI reconciliation

The schema is largely TEIish but not actually TEI. In principle (like anything else) it could be expressed as a TEI customization, and thus more easily integrated with TEI-based applications, if an analysis were done to determine its specific points of variance from TEI.

Once DHQauthor is out of beta, such a list should be made and a customization of TEI P5 developed that expresses the DHQ ML rules.

General CMS

Not just XSLT for peer reviews but for repository browsing in general

OAI gateway development

Ask WendellPiez or JohnUnsworth? what's going on with this.

Visualizations

• Various trans-document relationships
• Visualizations of tag usage across and within documents

Cooking up a thought: JuliaFlanders (in email): "Well, one thing I would love to see is a way of representing the interconnections between articles (as instantiated in shared keywords and bibliographic references as well as explicit pointers to one another).... ... networks: click on an article and see what other articles are related to it (thickness of line represents degree of relatedness? color of line indicates the domain they share? proximity indicates how close the publication dates are?); each node is itself clickable."

WendellPiez adds: These are cross-document relations: it would also be cool to generate graphs or graphics of per-document or inter-document phenomena. SVG is not the best solution for network plotting. But SVG could be used for many other graphical renderings, and stylesheets already exist that would do neat things displaying, say, single XML instances (as nested boxes or layered panels), perhaps with indicators of their tag usage. Network-graphing software can be brought in to do some of the snazzier stuff like arbitrary links between articles as arcs between nodes in a traversable network. This is a whole research area.

We need a Cool Tools? page.... wait...

Validation service

Our server offering validation of documents for submission? (in the meantime try someone else's, like NIST's?)

Wiki integration

Wikis could do alot with an XML layer, though perhaps a very presentational one. In any case, lots of XML integration with wiki is thinkable, some of it on the cheap.

Access / classification

Top-down methods * classification systems (Topic Maps?) * usage of statistically common terms * synonym-based or bibliography-based clustering * text analysis: e.g. unlikely phrases

Interactive stuff

This is a big area!

• web forms/REST architecture, over Cocoon/OpenCMS?
• build for bottom-up networks of synonyms/correlations categorizing articles
  • incl reader tagging of articles
  • ratings
  • a way to do reviews? reader comments?

Any other ideas

Please suggest any other ideas to the mailing lists.

Integration of TAPoR? tools

ReadingTools is an idea to weave a collection of local and remote text analysis and reading tools into the system.

Ground rules

Since formal coordination is to be kept to a minimum (in the interests of reducing overhead and increasing efficiencies), there are no ground rules. Opt in by joining dhq-tech. Opt out by unsubscribing. Volunteer for projects as you like, or just lurk.

Projects tracked here are expected to be motivated more or less directly by requirements for DHQ, as articulated by the Technical Editor or by other staff or community members. Development may be in a range of technologies, including especially XSLT and other XML-related technologies. Some Skunkworks projects or productions may be collected in a set of Cool Tools for use both in and for DHQ.

Skunkworks participants may also participate in the production of DHQ (as contributors, peer reviewers, tag wranglers, technical support etc), but these activities will be in addition to and separate from participation in Skunkworks. Because the only topic on the dhq-tech list is technology in and for DHQ, dhq-tech discussions will not be limited to Skunkworks projects. But Skunkworks projects will always be on topic on dhq-tech.

From time to time, projects devised in and by the Skunkworks will be integrated by the Technical Editor of DHQ into DHQ's core processes. More generally, Skunkworks projects and Cool Tools will simply serve as resources for the community.

-- Last tweaked by WendellPiez - 15 Dec 2005