Article
The Sixth Generation of the Perseus Digital Library and a Workflow for Open PhilologyGregory Crane, James Tauber, Alison Babeu, Lisa Cerrato, Charles Pletcher, Clifford Wulfman, Sergiusz Kazmierski, Farnoosh Shamsian
This paper presents an overview of recent developments by the Perseus Digital Library in creating theBeyond Translation reading environment, a foundational component in the transition toward Perseus 6,built on the ATLAS (Aligned Text and Linguistic Annotation Server) architecture. It highlights theintegration of diverse open data sources from multiple digital humanities projects, all brought together tosupport an innovative, richly layered digital reading experience. Following this, the paper details the keyservices offered by Beyond Translation, including text-translation alignments, advancedmorpho-syntactic analysis, audio annotations, and enhanced access to integrated reference resources suchas commentaries and dictionaries. The paper concludes with a discussion of forthcoming enhancementsand the future trajectory of the ATLAS architecture.
Published on June 10, 2025
Article
Creating a scientific workflow to manage Old Italian textsEmiliano Degl'Innocenti, Francesco Pinna, Alessia Spadi, Federica Spinelli
The management and analysis of extensive collections (corpora) of texts is a complex task, encompassing both technological and scientific considerations. Researchers involved in textual studies (including, but not limited to, philologists, palaeographers and codicologists) do not merely extract information from texts; they also examine visual elements - such as layout and mise-en-page - and physical characteristics of written materials such as printed books and manuscripts. Their analysis includes text structure, material used, word layout on the page and any annotations or notes. The development of efficient scientific workflows to handle these diverse aspects is a significant challenge in the field of digital humanities. The following article describes a scientific workflow supporting the management of Old Italian texts, offering innovative integration of semantic technologies and philological methods to enhance scholarly digital editions.
Published on June 12, 2025
Article
finnsurveytext: Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Responses in RAdeline Clarke, Krista Lagus, Maria Valaste
The finnsurveytext R package has been created to facilitate the analysis of responses to open-ended survey questions and other structured text data. The package offers a user-friendly, open-source tool and workflow that supports reproducible analysis of text data, including summarisation of response properties, identification of frequent words and phrases, visualisation of responses and creation of a concept network plot. The second version of the package was released in August 2024. It includes integration with the popular survey package to allow survey design to be incorporated into the analysis. While the package was created for the analysis of responses written in Finnish, it can also be used to analyse text in other languages. The tool aims to make analysing open-ended questions accessible to social science and humanities scholars without strong programming skills or extensive knowledge of Natural Language Processing methodologies. The objective is to enable the rich data obtained from responses to open-ended questions to be harnessed so that it can be better understood within the context of numeric or categorical data analysis.
Published on June 23, 2025
Article
Fluffy Publication Workflow: Preserving Humanities Research Data with the TextGrid RepositoryUbbo Veentjer, Stefan Buddenbohm, José Calvo Tello, Stefan E. Funk, Ralf Klammer, Nanette Rißler-Pipka, Alex Steckel, Lukas Weimer, George Dogaru, Mathias Göbel
This paper introduces a revised publication workflow for textual research data in the TextGrid Repository. This repository supports the accessibility and reusability of research outputs in the humanities. The new workflow simplifies the publication process by integrating familiar tools such as TEI, XPath, Git, and Jupyter Notebooks. This reduces the technical burden for users, while still ensuring metadata quality controls. For these reasons, we refer to the new workflow as fluffy, emphasising its ease of use.The workflow also allows for metadata enrichment without altering original data files, improving overall data and metadata quality and aligning with FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). By showcasing completed research projects, we demonstrate how the workflow enhances the discoverability and citation of published outputs. The paper concludes by outlining future steps to integrate the workflow with additional services, aiming for a more user-friendly experience and higher metadata quality.
Published on August 27, 2025
