Seeking a New Developer

The Center for Digital Theology, a research unit in the Department of Theological Studies of Saint Louis University, seeks to hire a Senior Web Developer.  This successful candidate  will be part of a team who design web-based applications that support advanced research in the humanities.  Reporting to the Center’s Director, the Senior Developer will be responsible for backend development including database design and management as well as system architecture. The developer will be responsible for ensuring all applications meet W3C standards for interoperability.  Part of the position’s tasks includes acting as a liaison concerning technical operations for partnering institutions.

The Center seeks a creative and self-motivated developer who will take the initiative in system design and implementation.  S/He will have strong communication skill, possess the ability to work in a team, and work according to set deadlines.  S/He will work within an agile development method, participate in debugging and work closely with use case testers and contracting clients.

The successful candidate will have a minimum 2 years in software development with Java.  S/He will also have some experience with JavaScript. Knowledge of other coding languages (Ruby, Python, etc.) would also be an asset.

The salary range is $42,600-$64,000 and will be based on qualifications and experience.  This position comes with a full range of benefits offered to full-time employees of Saint Louis University.

Applicants can learn more about the Center at its website and see its most recent project at www.t-pen.org

Apply online at jobs.slu.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=65031 (this link breaks, search by selecting Theological Studies from the Department drop down box).

Re-Tooling T-PEN's Logo

As we get ready for the last stage of T-PEN's planned development, Patrick Cuba, T-PEN's GUI developer has been re-designing our logo.  He was assigned this task not only because he has greater artistic talent than Jim Ginther and Abigail Firey (who developed the initial logo), but also there was a lack of clarity about the IPR of the old T-Rex image itself.  We are therefore very pleased to headline our new logo here.

Our mascot holds both quill and scroll as he surges ahead ready to consume any and all manuscripts with scholarly mastication!  This image will sit on T-PEN's landing page with the next release due at the end of February 2012.

All other pages will have a more modest image:

The T-Rex image has been licensed from Mineo Shiraishi at dinosaurcentral.com .  The background image is from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 415, p. 171.

Michael

Greetings! I’m Michael Elliot, a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, where I study Anglo-Saxon canon law. I am currently involved in a number of editorial projects related to this subject, foremost among these being a new edition of the Excerptiones Pseudo-Ecgberhti, a mercurial and textually anarchic canon law collection compiled (in at least five versions) by Archbishop Wulfstan of York in the early decades of the eleventh century.

I come to T-PEN via the Carolingian Canon Law Project. I have been involved with CCL since 2009 preparing transcriptions of early medieval canon law collections and working with Dr. Abigail Firey and her team to develop a system of XML mark-up to describe these collections. As a participant in the CCL I was involved early on in experiments with producing CCL-conformant transcriptions using T-PEN. It has been exciting to witness how T-PEN has developed and improved over just this last year, becoming an ever easier and more enjoyable tool to use. Over the next six months I will be helping to further test T-PEN as the project moves into beta release. In addition to preparing transcriptions of a variety of canonical manuscripts within T-PEN, I will be experimenting with introducing structural mark-up into a T-PEN transcription “in real time”, as well as testing the functionality of importing transcriptions into, and exporting transcriptions out of T-PEN for incorporation into the CCL’s database.

The advantages of transcribing texts within the T-PEN environment are becoming clearer and more numerous the more I work with the project. I am especially enthusiastic about the partnership between T-PEN and the CCL because these projects are developing new and exciting ways of approaching the previously intractable problem of editing texts whose textual tradition defies a recensionist methodology. My own pet project, Wulfstan’s Excerptiones, is such a text, and I hope one day to take advantage of the tools developed by T-PEN and the CCL to prepare an edition of this difficult and misunderstood work.

Alison

Hi there! My name is Alison Tara Walker and I am the Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the T-PEN project.

I'll be working on the project remotely from my home in Seattle, where I moved after completing a Ph.D. in English at UCLA. My doctoral dissertation, Politics, Patronage, and Orthodoxy in Late Medieval England argues that patronizing orthodox spirituality became an effective political gambit for the Lancastrian family, helping to stabilize an incipient dynasty by establishing its own spiritual legitimacy, in a time when the English church was also under siege. In addition to studying the literary culture of medieval England, my research also pays particular attention to the digital humanities, manuscript studies, and paleography.

I've also worked on a number of other digital humanities projects with a medieval bent, including the Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library and UCLA's Digital Canon Law Project.

During my tenure with the T-PEN project, I will be testing its functionality while I prepare an edition of a lovely Middle English miscellany (Cambridge, Harvard University, Houghton MS Eng 530), once thought to have been written by John Shirley. This project is sure to test my paleographical chops, as the manuscript has no less than 6 scribes and is around 200 folios in length!

Countdown to the Launch of T-PEN Beta (1.0)

For the last few weeks, we have been focusing on some pretty heavy debugging and some basic housekeeping as we prepare for the beta release of T-PEN.  The launch date is now set for Monday, 24 October 2011.  So now you can set your watches and calendars.

Preparation for the beta release has included:

1. We have migrated T-PEN to a virtual server in the Network Services of Saint Louis University.  T-PEN had always run in a virtual environment--in a linux box sitting on our Windows server.  This started producing dropped connections, so much so that many of the javascript calls on the JSP pages were never completed.  Now we are running on virtual linux server and the quality of service has increased significantly. 
2. We have automated our build procedure, and so regular builds will be pushed automatically (still allowing for manual builds to fix critical bugs) on a daily basis to the test-bed and then weekly to the live version. 
3. We've developed a user reporting system that will be accessible on each page of T-PEN. Users will be able to report a problem (bug), suggest a new feature, ask a question and/or suggest a new repository for T-PEN users.  All these user-reported issues will be fed automatically into our bug-reporting and software management system.
4. We have restructured our data store in a way that tightens the relationship between the image coordinates of a line and any transcription a user enters.  This new data structure will provide greater flexibility in line parsing adjustments and will further ensure data is never lost when a user modifies how a manuscript page is parsed. 
5. We have reduced the number of individual pages that enabled T-PEN's functionality.  We are nearly at the point that the Transcription UI is becoming an "application window."  Manual line parsing and the line breaking of existing transcription text are now integrated into the Transcription UI.  The also means the codebase executes faster, and there is a more streamlined way to update the data store.

This is all in addition to the continual acts of bug-discovery and bug-fixing!  

Stay tuned for more updates as we head towards T-PEN 1.0.

T-PEN User Testing at Dartmouth College (August 18-19, 2011)

T-PEN's PI (Jim Ginther) and Senior Developer (Jon Deering) spent two full days participating in a digital tools workshop at Dartmouth College, sponsored by Stanford's DMSTech project.  As Stanford develops a new framework for digital repositories, they are also supporting three major research clusters of scholars.  These scholars focus on the manuscripts of the Parker Library (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge).  Naturally, these research clusters were in need of digital tools as they worked with Parker's digital collection.  The two tools selected were the new annotation tool, Digital Mappaemundi (DM) and, yes, T-PEN.

Over the two days, Ginther and Deering (along with DM's team, Martin Foys and Shannon Bradshaw) introduced fourteen users from North America and Europe to the functionality of the two tools.  These scholars received individual instruction and got to play with the tools for their own work.

For T-PEN, this was the first real-world "test drive" of our work and it yielded some excellent feedback.  We were able to observe some new user expectations when it came to work flow on a project, as well how users expected the tool to function for each main feature.  Since T-PEN is still at a pre-beta release, these testers broke T-PEN a number of times (which is what you hope for when testing); but more importantly they provided clear and helpful feedback on what they wanted T-PEN to do for them. They were all a very gracious and patient group of scholars.

The workshop was organized by Stephen Nichols,The James M Beall Professor of Medieval French at John Hopkins University.  As a former faculty member of Dartmouth, he ensured we were treated very well and had all the necessary resources at hand.  The workshop ended with an outstanding dinner at Steve's summer home in Vermont, where we dined on exquisite food with the mountains in the backdrop.

These new users will continue to use T-PEN over the next year and will become a significant source for usability testing and feature development. The T-PEN team is honored to be working with such careful scholars, and we know the partnership will only make T-PEN better.

(A few more photos are available on Picasaweb)

Patrick joins the team

Greetings! My name is Patrick Cuba, the GUI Web Developer on the T-PEN project. As a member of the team, I am responsible for the graphical design and interface. This project is an exciting challenge to enhance the experience of transcription with deference to the analog nature of the manuscripts and the established conventions and habits of the scholars who will be using it. T-PEN should be a tool that feels obvious, not become something else to learn. My task is to create a flexible and simple interface that optimizes usability, intuitiveness, and comfort. Your feedback and input about the process of transcription (such as comments on entries like "How Do You Transcribe?") are invaluable to my work.

I have been employed by Saint Louis University for nearly a decade. My work in Student Development had been instructive, engaging, and fulfilling. When the position for GUI Web Developer posted, however, I saw an incredible opportunity to couple my undergraduate degrees of English and Philosophy & Religion (Truman State University) with my passion for the application of technology to the sincere advancement of knowledge and culture. As I learned about T-PEN and previous projects of the Center for Digital Theology at Saint Louis University, I found a door cracked open for myself in digital humanities, which had been previously unknown to me. To have entered into such a project with a competent and welcoming team already hard at work is intimidating and inspiring.

The first week is often too full of orientations about retirement planning, wrestling with the IT Department to get appropriate permissions, and finding the best lunch spots. Nevertheless, I will be working diligently to offer quality updates and adjustments to T-PEN that increase usability, expand compatability, and demonstrate the possibilities of technology intelligently applied.

Recruiting a GUI Web Developer

T-PEN is currently advertising for a GUI Developer.  The advertisement is posted online and applications must be submitted online at jobs.slu.edu

Here are the basic details:

Web Developer (Theological Studies) JOB DESCRIPTION Job Summary: Under general direction, assists in the creation and deployment of a web-based digital tool for scholars working with digital images of unpublished manuscripts; performs Graphical User Interface (GUI) related duties with responsibility for the user interface. CHARACTERISTIC JOB TASKS AND RESPONSIBILITIES May include any and/or all of the following: Participates as a member of a design team, working with the senior developer, project directors, and other personnel. Designs a set of user-centered, interactive Web pages to integrate various APIs that will comprise the digital tool. Contributes to testing and bug tracking of various iterations of the digital tool. Responds to formal usability testing and makes appropriate changes in implementation. Oversees the Center's Web pages and ensures they are up to date and functional. Performs other duties as assigned. KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, ABILITIES AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS Knowledge of Web development, applications, and technology Knowledge of HTML/CSS and Javascript Knowledge of programming and graphic design Project management skills Interpersonal/human relations skills Written and verbal communication skills Ability to provide site management solutions Ability to perform work that is technically oriented, working on various platforms, including Microsoft and Apple Ability to recognize trends in Web development Ability to maintain confidentiality MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS Education and experience equivalent to: Bachelor's degree; supplemented with two (2) years related work experience

Jim

I’m Jim Ginther and I am the Principal Investigator for T-PEN.  I have been working in Digital Humanities for over a decade and T-PEN is my seventh research project in DH.  I am very excited about this project for two reasons.  First, T-PEN is one step closer to a major dream of mine to create an editing suite that assists the editor from the transcription stage; through editing, collating and annotation; to the final digital publication–all  in a digital workspace.   Given how many other teams are working towards this same dream, the T-PEN team is committed to interoperability:  we want to ensure that users can take their transcriptions and import them easily into other tools.  The second reason I am excited about T-PEN is that I am providing one of the regular use cases during development.  I will begin a critical edition of the Super Psalterium of Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1170-1253).  I have been studying the life and works of this English thinker since my doctoral studies.  Grosseteste was one of the few masters we know by name at the University of Oxford in the early thirteenth century  He was also a polymath. He was a leader in natural philosophy (in the areas we now identify as cosmology and mathematical physics), an outstanding theologian, and bishop of Lincoln.  His commentary on the Psalter is the last major work from his days at Oxford.  Editing this text is not without its challenges since its textual history is a complicated story.  During T-PEN’s development I will be transcribing one of the manuscript witnesses of this large text (well over 200K words in length!).  Given the unique character of the text, I will definitely be putting T-PEN through its paces. 

Tomás

Hello! My name is Tomás O’Sullivan, and I am a research fellow on the T-PEN project.

I hail from Bantry, Co. Cork, Ireland, and hold degrees in Medieval History and in Theology from University College Cork and Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. I am currently based in the Department of Theological Studies and the Center for Digital Theology at Saint Louis University, where I cut my digital teeth over the last few years working on the Electronic Norman Anonymous Project with Jim Ginther and Jon Deering.

My research interests focus on the ecclesiastical culture of early medieval Ireland within its Insular and European contexts, with particular concentration on homilies, eschatology (conceptions of the end of the world and the afterlife) and hagiography (writings about the saints). My PhD dissertation examines a distinct collection of Insular homilies which survives in four manuscripts copied on the Continent in the ninth century; these manuscripts will form the basis for my test-case to run T-PEN through its paces as development proceeds. I’ll also function as the technical writer for the project, creating a user manual to accompany the final product.

Transcribing and editing the anonymous Latin homilies of the early Middle Ages is a daunting task, as these sermons were often composed from a variety of textual extracts and images which could be combined and recombined in a kaleidoscope of patterns; I’ve taken to using the phrase “microtexts in motion” to describe this situation where, very often, there is no such thing as a “stable” text. I’m excited about the possibility of using T-PEN’s automated encoding and personalized mark-up features to rein in these mobile microtexts. I’m confident that if T-PEN can help me tame these anonymous homilies, it should be able to handle anything!

quick hello from the Co-PI (Abigail Firey, Univ. of Kentucky)

I come to T-PEN as the director of a project that has as one of its central activities the transcription of unedited, usually unprinted manuscripts: the Carolingian Canon Law project. It is a highly collaborative project, designed to receive contributions from scholars present and future, known and unknown, in order to build a “conceptual corpus” of the legal texts known to Carolingian jurists. Because of its open nature and the need for transcriptions prepared to the highest editorial standards, the project will benefit enormously from a tool that allows easy transcription and simultaneous preparation of an encoded file (we are using TEI-P5) without any knowledge of markup required on the part of the contributor, and that also allows ready verification and correction of transcriptions. Transcribing is – as experienced scholars know!—a demanding task, and there are dangers lurking. We had a strange experience on the CCL when we were reviewing a transcription that had been prepared from an existing electronic version of a text and then altered to match the manuscript readings: until we started line-by-line proofreading, we did not notice that very familiar words in the first rubric were, in fact, missing in the manuscript! If the transcriber had been using T-PEN to create a new transcription, there likely would not have been the error; even if the presumed reading had crept in, it would have been easy to check and correct the transcription. Our other challenge has been to keep up with encoding transcriptions (we haven’t, is the short answer). We cannot wait to implement the “auto-encoding” function of T-PEN, so our research assistants can then dig into serious scholarship, instead of encoding all the time! (Some readers may remember Stan Rogers’ “White Collar Holler” (“Can you code it? Program it right!”)

Jon

I'm Jon Deering, the Senior Developer working on TPEN.

As Jim said, I'm getting started on TPEN today. The first thing I needed to do today was build a bit of a front page for the tool. The transcription prototype was built for ENAP, which was only a single manuscript. While it was built to allow other manuscripts to be available, including manuscripts from other repositories, we didn't have a good way to browse the manuscripts available in the tool. The front page I built lists the available manuscripts, along with the name of the hosting repository, as a link to the first page of that MS available for transcribing. During our Monday meeting, I'm going to see if we can get the go ahead for at least one full repository made available in the prototype, maybe more. By then I think we will have our domain, and anyone will be able to go in and test transcribing with those few hundred manuscripts.

I'm also working on the customizable hotkeys, which allow a transcriber to set up a number of non standard keys they use often in transcribing (ÞÐÆ in middle English for example). Those characters will be clickable on a toolbar at the bottom, and also have control combinations assigned to them, starting with control 1-9. We had a static set for middle English when a paleography class used our prototype last fall, and the feedback we received was very positive.

As far as introducing myself, there isn't much to say. I keep a rather low profile online, not using facebook and only using twitter for work related communication. While I don't have a humanities background, I have been caught puzzling over the peculiarities of manuscripts now and then, just because they end up in front of me while I work on projects. This is particularly true of the image processing project we did over the summer, which I'll post about in the future when I can include links back to the results. I really enjoy the image processing side of the work we do, and the way setting the computer on images of a manuscript can really aid in not only the editing, but the exploration of the document.. I would say that is my favorite aspect of working on both ENAP and TPEN.

I attended THATCamp London in July, an unconference for digital humanities that occurred right before DH2010. I enjoyed the opportunity to share my work, and find that others in the field had solved some of the problems I was dreading. THATCamp provides a less formal, very open and collaborative forum where such things can happen. In particular, while showing our transcription prototype to a few people, one showed me an in house tool used for transcription at the library he worked for. The method they used for representing overlapping tags with colored underlining is an elegant solution, and something I expect to use in TPEN.

Welcome Back!

Jon Deering, T-PEN's senior Developer, begins work on the project today. Jon was the sole developer for the Electronic Norman Anonymous Project (ENAP), a project that finished in July 2010. It is great to have him back. His enormous energy and creative approach to software engineering has garnered him a great deal of respect and praise here at Saint Louis University and amongst our collaborating institutional partners. We know we are going to see great things from him as we all get hip deep into T-PEN development.

Jon will introduce himself, along with the other project staff, in the near future.

T-PEN Strategy Meeting

Yesterday the core design team for T-PEN met to plan out the work flow for the next 18 months. We worked through a hefty agenda that took almost six hours to complete, but we covered everything! That included a terrific "on the fly" schematic outline of T-PEN's basic functionality that Jon Deering, T-PEN's senior developer, put on the white board (right). It was exciting to start talking about the practical realities of a project we've been dreaming about for a few years now.

We've got lots to do, but there is going to be some fun work ahead.