BCNETwork News

April 2007

Shakespeare Across the Ether: Transmitting Digital Literature to Researchers Anytime, Anywhere

By Vanessa Scott

Every so often, a computing project is developed which impacts researchers in a traditionally unrelated field, creating an interdisciplinary relationship with broad-reaching benefits for scholars, educators and students.

TAPoR, the Text Analysis Portal for Research, is one such example. As the first large-scale computational project in the arts and humanities, TAPoR acts as a centralized gateway for the retrieval and analysis of scholarly electronic texts, and is helping propel the humanities into the digital age. Unique to Canada, it has given scholars across the country a unified platform for developing standards, tools and methods that will set the pace for the next several decades and enable Canadian researchers to participate as equals on the international stage.

Partly funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, TAPoR (www.tapor.ca ) aggregates data from six regional humanities computing centres across the country: McMaster University, the University of Victoria (www.tapor.uvic.ca), the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto, Université de Montreal and the University of New Brunswick.

Redefining the Accessibility of Text

The primary focus of TAPoR is to make texts more accessible and methods of analysis easier to use, as well as finding better, faster ways of organizing and delivering humanities material. As a result, TAPoR infrastructure has been the catalyst for an increase in scholarly research.

Collaborators refer to TAPoR’s “halo effect” to demonstrate the success of the 55 projects that directly use its infrastructure. Roughly 150 researchers have harnessed the portal’s power, earning more than $ 8 million in additional research funds, hiring over 135 research assistants and producing in excess of 400 publications and conference presentations.

Data in the Wild: Sharing Human Experience Over Advanced Research Networks

A central figure leading BC's role in TAPoR is Dr. Ray Siemens, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing, director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at UVic, and professor in UVic's Department of English. Siemens is also president of the Society for Digital Humanities, formed over 20 years ago to explore the challenges and rewards of integrating literature with computing technology.

Siemens notes that people are only now beginning to realize that the humanities deal with some of the most complex data around. "Unlike particle physics data, which are comparatively regular, in the humanities we look at the record of human experience, for which there is no standard system of expression," says Siemens. As a result, he and his co-workers have come to refer to this complex, highly encoded material as 'data in wild.' By comparison, all else seems tame, and TAPoR has posed a unique learning experience for researchers in high performance computing.

For instance, a pilot project in which Siemens is currently involved, The Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn), is working to gather everything of relevance to this period so that one text may simultaneously query millions in order to give readers fast access to the most complete information on the era as possible. An online version of Macbeth could be linked to a digitalized performance of the play, as well as historical reference material and other media. REKn currently weighs in at three to four terabytes of multimedia data, roughly the amount of all the information contained in four thousand complete editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Says Siemens, "This is roughly equivalent to the size of mapping the ocean floor or the heavens."

Advanced research networks are therefore essential for managing such large, highly encoded data sets. The UVic TAPoR group transfers data using two and eight gigabyte channels developed by its partner, the Canadian Institute of Particle Physics. This in turn connects to BCNET's Optical Regional Advanced Network (ORAN) and the national network, CANARIE’s CA*net 4, providing connections to international counterparts.

This allows for the constant transmission of data almost instantaneously via direct point-to-point dedicated links to partners across Canada and in the US and Europe. TAPoR is a multinational effort, collaborating via an international advisory board put in place two years before the project began, in order to investigate how Canada could uniquely contribute to the digital humanities in a way that would meet international needs.

Benefiting Scholars, Students, Canadians and Literature

As anticipated, TAPoR has had a transformative effect on humanities research and education in Canada and around the world. In addition to providing a rich, high-performance archive of e-texts and analysis tools, many TAPoR projects free researchers and students from having to “go to the source.” Networking technology has made it possible to bring original literature to researchers of all degrees of experience no matter where they are.

"When projects like REKn provide high-definition access to original documents," says Siemens, "we have an increased ability to teach students to make up their own minds about the material, and even giving them the possibility of making new discoveries." This also benefits the literature, since online formatting protects rare or fragile printed documents.

The REKn database model, which is being scaled to include increasingly larger data sets, has also attracted the attention of other reading disciplines, such as health and legal informatics. In two to five years, Siemens hopes that, as part of the TAPoR partnership, REKn will have expanded into a more generally focussed professional reading environment. Like a "thinking Google for readers," this would provide Canadians with a customizable, intelligent, university-based portal to every sort of text in the humanities, the social sciences and beyond.

Based on the philosophy that e-texts are an increasingly important type of evidence for human inquiry, the development of such resources complements our increasing integration of electronic texts into academics, culture and business. It is also a reminder of how high performance computing and advanced research networks converge with new fields of study to produce innovative and important research opportunities.

"By understanding how to represent literature through information technology," says Siemens, "we can disseminate it easier and allow readers to make sense of it on a new level. This is important because such representations of the human experience will allow us to better understand the past and anticipate the future."