The ARCHway Project was funded by the Information Technology Research program of the National Science Foundation. The project set four high-level objectives: (1) to develop a universal software platform for creation and maintenance of Image-based Electronic Editions (IBEE); (2) to develop methods, algorithms, and data structures for management of concurrent, document-centric, XML data; (3) to develop methods, algorithms, and data structures for management of image-based XML encoding; and (4) to establish a teaching and learning infrastructure fostering interdisciplinary collaboration for graduate and undergraduate students in Computer Science and the Humanities.
ARCHway provided an architecture to put together editing tools under development by the Electronic Boethius. It chose the open-source Java Eclipse platform as the development and deployment environment for the Edition Production Technology (EPT). Interoperating Eclipse plugins developed under ARCHway provide infrastructure for creating and maintaining any Image-Based Electronic Editions (IBEE). This architecture provides modularity, integration, built-in version control, automatic updates for the EPT, and platforms for both development and deployment of the EPT tools. The source codes for a stable and useable EPT is available at http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~ept/archway/source/ARCHway-EPT-src.zip (16MB).
ARCHway was aware of the problem of overlapping markup as it relates to encoding damaged manuscripts through the experience of the Electronic Beowulf, Digital Atheneum, and Electronic Boethius projects, as well as the broad experience of the text-encoding community. The complexity and competing interests of the features of fire-damaged manuscripts and the non-hierarchical nature of a manuscript text, in general, required a transparent, automated process for managing overlapping markup, freeing the human editors to work on editing the texts. ARCHway developed two approaches for managing document-centric concurrent markup. The first method, an XML segment tree database, was developed and successfully tested, but was not implemented in the EPT. The second method, Concurrent Markup Hierarchies (CMH), which is implemented in the stable EPT, manages the encoding through Extended XPath.
ARCHway developed and successfully tested a database management system for image-based multihierarchical XML. It also tested storing, retrieving, and searching concurrent markup hierarchies. This system, written in C for Linux, and not yet tested for Windows nor implemented in the stable EPT, also addressed the problem of persistent storage of image-based multihierarchical markup. In particular, it developed data structures for representation of image-based XML as well as a special-purpose multihierarchical XML database management system.
The Collaboratory for the Research in Computing for Humanities, in addition to providing lab space and other facilities, served as a collaborative, deeply interdisciplinary, environment for Computer Science and humanities students, bringing together individuals and groups each week for two-and-a-half years for mutually beneficial projects. Joint teams of students, both graduate and undergraduate, from both disciplines, conducted student projects, and graduate students wrote theses and dissertations within the ARCHway framework.
The project was supported by The British Library, which provided privileged access to high-quality collections, manuscript and curatorial expertise, and digitization facilities. The University of Kentucky designated space and network communications support in the W.T. Young Library for the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities. The Center for Computational Sciences contributed system administration, research assistance, and participation in a lecture series. The Electronic Boethius project, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, contributed all of the editing plugin-tools for the EPT.
This award was effective January 2003 and expired May 2005.
This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0219924. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
This grant was awarded pursuant to the authority of the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 (42 U.S.C. 1861 et seq.) and is subject to GC-1 Grant General Conditions (10/98) and the following terms and conditions:
This award was made in accordance with the provisions of NSF 98-63, "Information Technology Research."