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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 353. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London Hosted by King's Digital Lab www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org Date: 2019-10-28 21:39:31+00:00 From: Jan Christoph MeisterSubject: CATMA: version 6 of the web application for collaborative, hermeneutic text annotation and analysis launched We’re happy to announce the launch of CATMA 6, a major new release of our free open source web application for text annotation and analysis. For more information please visit https://catma.de CATMA currently supports the work of some 9.500 individual researchers and over 100 projects worldwide who use CATMA for the study of texts across a broad variety of languages, including right-to-left written ones. Over the past ten years CATMA's development and maintenance has been supported by grants from various agencies and donors, including DFG (German Research Foundation), BMBF (German Ministry of Science and Research), Google Inc., Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the University of Hamburg. CATMA 6 now comes with a completely new UI design (based on Google's 'Material Design' theme) and a list of features that set it apart conceptually from any other annotation tool: 1. 'Undogmatic' annotation concept: CATMA is designed to support declarative (taxonomy driven) as well as interpretive, i.e. bottom-up hermeneutic annotation practices. CATMA uses external stand-off markup and can handle structured as well as unstructured annotation, overlapping and discontinuous structures, meta-annotation and qualitative ‘fuzzy’ attributions, and an unlimited depth of annotation variants. 2. Collaboration functionality: in CATMA 6 you can create project teams and work collaboratively on texts, corpora, annotations and markup schemata. 3. Hermeneutic workflow model: the system seamlessly integrates annotation, analysis, and visualization. This functional integration emulates the often explorative, iterative and cyclical workflow routines that characterise humanistic research practice. 4. Technology:the new CATMA 6 backend system architecture combines a graph data base for the processing of source texts and their related JSON encoded markup, with a Gitlab version and user management component. Our CATMA servers are hosted at the Universität Hamburg in Germany; European data privacy legislation applies. In 2008 when we set out to develop CATMA (Computer Assisted Text Markup and Analysis) our initial goal was to re-implement TACT (Textual Analysis Computing Tools), the pioneer 1980s desktop tool championed by Ian Lancashire and programmed by John Bradley. The functionality of CATMA 6 may long have surpassed that of its famous predecessor, but the intellectual motivation has remained: we still believe that "text markup is currently the best tool at our disposal for ensuring that the hermeneutic circle continues to turn (...)", as Lou Burnard succinctly put it in his 1998 article "On the hermeneutic implications of text encoding" (see http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou/wip/herman.htm). For HUMANIST readers interested in keeping the wheel turning and in an un-'dog'-matic, hermeneutic approach to text annotation and analysis CATMA 6 might therefore be worth a try. Visit us at https://catma.de - meow! Chris -- -------------------------------- Dr. Jan Christoph Meister Universitätsprofessor für Digital Humanities Schwerpunkt Deutsche Literatur und Textanalyse Institut für Germanistik Universität Hamburg Überseering 35 22 297 Hamburg +49 40 42838 2972 +49 172 40865 41 http://jcmeister.de _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
Editor: Willard McCarty (King's College London, U.K.; Western Sydney University, Australia)
Software designer: Malgosia Askanas (Mind-Crafts)
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