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Digital Humanities 2008

The Digital Humanities 2008 conference was the conference to visit! It covered topics ranging from computer linguistics, dialectology, corpora, digital text-editions, and last but not least information- systems for people from the humanities and philosophers. In this last category there were 2 projects presented that we think are are especially interesting; of course besides our own project, LogiLogi :-).

The first was Discovery/Talia. It is a project that comes very close to LogiLogi in terms of what it wants to achieve, but it takes a different approach. It is being developed in 2 stages/environments. The first is a web-platform (in Rails) to be used for multiple sites containing philosophical sources, like the works of Wittgenstein and Hegel. These sites are to be maintained by specialists that function as gatekeepers. The second part is a desktop- application for writing philosophical texts, and for annotating and sharing them. This bit of the project is comparible to LogiLogi in it’s aims. We look forward to it’s development. And we are currently discussing posibillities for cooperation.

The second was PReE, by the Electronical Textual Cultures Lab. Also being developed in Rails, it focuses mainly on making existing texts available, but it also wants to have features like the easy annotation-system that LogiLogi has. Sadly enough PReE is not yet online or available, but we are now also in contact with them.

Our presentation was on saturday, and it went well. We got many good questions and references. The slides of our presentation can be downloaded here. And you can find the tex sources in our repository.

In all it was a great conference, and surely worth the trip to Oulu, Finland. There were quite some cool people around, and after the conference we had an excursion that basically was a long bus-trip on which we had many interesting conversations. By the way, a good thing about the city of Oulu is that they have city-wide free wireless for everyone. Hope it spreads :-)