This poster will demonstrate a collection of text processing tools designed to work through a portal over the Web. The tools are designed to work on plain text, html or xml encoded e-texts. They are easily used to search electronic texts without the need to install software, preprocess the texts, or master complex tools.

HOW DO TAPOR.TOOLS (T.TOOLS) WORK?

T.tools are written in Ruby, an object-oriented scripting language like Perl and Python.° The T.tools are written so that they can be run on the command line or as CGI programs off our portal. This means that users of the tools need not install or maintain them, but if they wish, advanced users can download and adapt them. Using Web forms as an interface to the tools gives T.tools the capacity to be easily adapted to hide complexity or to provide local adaptations. Simple search and concordance forms can be created that can utilize xml markup without having to change the tools. Small scale publishers of electronic texts can provide T.tool Web forms that process their Web accessible e-texts without installing the software. The forms simply pass the URL for the text in a hidden field to the appropriate tool residing on our portal for processing. (We will demonstrate the adaptation of these tools to support the Hyperliste project, a collection of French medieval poetry online.)

WHAT ARE PORTAL TOOLS?

A portal is an entry point into a field.° In this case the T.tools are written to provide simple text processing tools for TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research), a multi-institutional project which has Canada Foundation for Innovation funding to create a portal for text analysis.°They are designed to provide a suite of simple text transformations that will eventually be managed by a portal environment that additionally provides user and interface customization tools. At present they can do the following:

• List and count words in a text.
• List and count elements in an xml text.
• List attributes and values in an xml text.
• Extract elements from an xml text.
• Find patterns (words or phrases) in a text.
• Find patterns in specific elements in a text.
• Create a concordance of found patterns or elements.
• Output results in either html for reading or xml for further processing.

This combination of functions allows the user to query an xml text to find words in specific parts of text or to extract selected parts by element name and attribute value. Users can also, should they not know the structure of the text, get a list of the elements or a list of words to search for. Users have a choice of output from simple output in html to output in xml that could be saved and processed locally.

WHAT TYPES OF USERS ARE ENVISAGED?

T.tools are designed to be used in three ways by users of differing levels of expertise. Introductory Users. A portal should be place one can learn through playful discovery about a field like computer assisted text analysis. T.tools are designed so that new users can try basic operations on electronic texts without having to install software or texts. As the T.tools do not preprocess texts they can be run on any text a new user can find on the Web. This allows a new user to experiment with text analysis on texts they know without much training. The tools are also designed so that they can be explained and documented in different ways to make them accessible to different communities. Small E-text Publishers. While large e-text projects have access to programmers and systems that allow them to adapt text processing tools to their texts, many small projects cannot afford to do more than make available their scholarly texts on the Web in html or xml/css form. T.tools provides tools run on our server which can be passed a text (actually a URL) for processing from a Web form set up by the publisher. Thus small projects can adapt our forms to their needs and integrate them into their sites. Advanced Users. As the code is made available as “open source” according to the definition at the Open Source Initiative, advanced users can download it and adapt it to their research needs.° T.tools have been built around a library of object classes commonly used in text processing whose methods can be called in new Ruby scripts, from the command line, or through IRB (Interactive Ruby). Thus the advanced user can use T.tools as a text processing language and then build new scripts to do things unanticipated by the developers.

WHAT ARE THE PROBLEMS WITH THIS MODEL?

The major drawback to this model is that T.tools are slow by comparison to other Web text tools like TACTWeb because they do not work with preprocessed indexes.° T.tools work best on chapter to book length texts not on larger corpora. The processing capabilities of the server used for the portal is also important. TAPoR has been funded to install high-end servers for the portal that will partially compensate for the cost of processing, but there is no substitution for more efficient tools when dealing with large texts. This is an issue which deserves further study. Further, T.tools is based on a “pipe-and-flow” model common in the Unix world which may not scale to certain types of interactive processing needed in the humanities, for example, situations where texts are being enriched and studied simultaneously.

WHY A POSTER?

This project is presented as a poster as that will provide the most convenient way to demonstrate the tools to potential users and redevelopers. Through the venue of a poster session we can demonstrate how T.tools work on the texts of the poster visitors. It will also allow us to engage humanists with small text projects that might benefit from such tools. With individual visitors we can adapt Web forms to show the usefulness of T.tools to their projects. CD-ROMs of the code and documentation will be distributed to advanced users.