The Tree of Texts project formally comes to an end in a few days; it’s been a fun two years and it is now time to look at the fruits of our research. We (that is, Tara) gave a talk at the DH 2012 conference in July about the project and its findings; we also participated in a paper led by our colleagues in the Leuven CS department about computational analysis of stemma graph models, which was presented at the CoCoMILE workshop during the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. We are now engaged in writing the final project paper; following up on the success of our DH talk, we will submit it for inclusion in the DH-related issue of LLC. Alongside all this, work on the publication of proceedings from our April workshop continues apace; nearly all the papers are in and the collection will soon be sent to the publisher.
More excitingly, from the perspective of text scholars and critical editors who have an interest in stemmatic analysis, we have made our analysis and visualization tools available on the Web! We are pleased to present Stemmaweb, which was developed in cooperation with members of the Interedition project and which provides an online interface to examining text collations and their stemmata. Stemmaweb has two homes:
http://treeoftexts.arts.kuleuven.be/stemmaweb/ (the official KU Leuven site)
http://byzantini.st/stemmaweb/ (Tara’s personal server, less official but much faster)
If you have a Google account or another OpenID account, you can use that to log in; once there you can view the texts that others have made public, and even upload your own. For any of your texts you can create a stemma hypothesis and analyze it with the tools we have used for the project; we will soon provide a means of generating a stemma hypothesis from a phylogenetic tree, and we hope to link our tools to those emerging soon from the STAM group at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.
Like almost all tools for the digital humanities, these are highly experimental. Unexpected things might happen, something might go wrong, or you might have a purpose for a tool that we never imagined. So send us feedback! We would love to hear from you.