Oxford Text Archive

Last updated

Oxford Text Archive (OTA) is an archive of electronic texts and other literary and language resources which have been created, collected and distributed for the purpose of research into literary and linguistic topics at the University of Oxford, England.

The OTA was founded by Lou Burnard and Susan Hockey of Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) in 1976, initially as the Oxford Archive of Electronic Literature. It is thought to be one of the first archives of digital academic textual resources to collect and distribute materials from other research centres. [1] The OTA continued to be hosted by OUCS (which became subsumed into IT Services [2] in 2012), and in November 2016, the OTA collections found a new home in the Bodleian Library. [3] In November 2021, the Bodleian Libraries posted an announcement stating that further deposits were no longer being accepted until further notice. From 2022, the OTA collections have been available from the Literary and Linguistic Data Service repository, which continues to develop the collections with new acquisitions, and is part of the national and European research infrastructure, as a CLARIN centre and a trusted repository in the AHRC-funded Infrastructure for Digital Arts and Humanities Programme.

The OTA collection consists of deposits of primary-source academic electronic editions and linguistic corpora created by the academic community. The OTA was one of founding centres in the European research infrastructure (CLARIN, the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure [4] ). The OTA collection contains many scholarly documents marked up according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, [5] including copies of all of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Early English Books Online (EEBO) texts which are now in the public domain, linked data. The OTA also manages the distribution of the British National Corpus (BNC).

From 1996 to 2008, the OTA was one of the centres of the Arts and Humanities Data Service, and hosted AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics, a national centre for the support of digital research in literary and linguistic subject areas in the UK.

Related Research Articles

The Perseus Digital Library, formerly known as the Perseus Project, is a free-access digital library founded by Gregory Crane in 1987 and hosted by the Department of Classical Studies of Tufts University. One of the pioneers of digital libraries, its self-proclaimed mission is to make the full record of humanity available to everyone. While originally focused on the ancient Greco-Roman world, it has since diversified and offers materials in Arabic, Germanic, English Renaissance literature, 19th century American documents and Italian poetry in Latin, and has sprouted several child projects and international cooperation. The current version, Perseus 4.0, is also known as the Perseus Hopper, and is mirrored by the University of Chicago.

The Women Writers Project, or WWP, is a long-term research and digital publication project within the field of feminist digital humanities that makes texts from early modern women writers in the English language available online through electronic text encoding. Since 1999, WWP has maintained Women Writers Online, an electronic collection of rare or difficult to obtain works written or co-authored by women from the early modern period. It is currently housed within the Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital humanities</span> Area of scholarly activity

Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.

The term e-Research refers to the use of information technology to support existing and new forms of research. This extends cyber-infrastructure practices established in STEM fields such as e-Science to cover other all research areas, including HASS fields such as digital humanities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Western Australia Library</span> Library at the University of Western Australia

The University of Western Australia (UWA) Library consists of five library sites on and near the campus. The library provides a wide range of services, facilities, and resources to students, staff, and the community including teaching, learning, research support, student IT support, and individual and collaborative learning spaces.

Digital history is the use of digital media to further historical analysis, presentation, and research. It is a branch of the digital humanities and an extension of quantitative history, cliometrics, and computing. Digital history is commonly digital public history, concerned primarily with engaging online audiences with historical content, or, digital research methods, that further academic research. Digital history outputs include: digital archives, online presentations, data visualizations, interactive maps, timelines, audio files, and virtual worlds to make history more accessible to the user. Recent digital history projects focus on creativity, collaboration, and technical innovation, text mining, corpus linguistics, network analysis, 3D modeling, and big data analysis. By utilizing these resources, the user can rapidly develop new analyses that can link to, extend, and bring to life existing histories

Marilyn Deegan is the former Director of Research Development at the former Centre for Computing in the Humanities, now the Department of Digital Humanities), King's College London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library</span>

The Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library is a large-scale digital library project, hosted and maintained by the University of Alicante in Alicante, Spain. It comprises the largest open-access repository of digitised Spanish-language historical texts and literature from the Ibero-American world. When officially launched in 1999, the BVMC was the first digital archive of Spanish-language texts on the internet, initially reproducing some 2,000 individual works by 400 of the most significant authors in Spanish, Latin American literary and Hispanic Africa. By 2005–2006 the number of registered and available works had reached over 22,000.

Data curation is the organization and integration of data collected from various sources. It involves annotation, publication and presentation of the data so that the value of the data is maintained over time, and the data remains available for reuse and preservation. Data curation includes "all the processes needed for principled and controlled data creation, maintenance, and management, together with the capacity to add value to data". In science, data curation may indicate the process of extraction of important information from scientific texts, such as research articles by experts, to be converted into an electronic format, such as an entry of a biological database.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oxford University Computing Services</span>

Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) until 2012 provided the central Information Technology services for the University of Oxford. The service was based at 7-19 Banbury Road in central north Oxford, England, near the junction with Keble Road. OUCS became part of IT Services, when the new department was created at the University of Oxford on 1 August 2012 through a merger of the three previous central IT departments: Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS), Business Services and Projects (BSP) and ICT Support Team (ICTST).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations</span>

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is a digital humanities umbrella organization formed in 2005 to coordinate the activities of several regional DH organizations, referred to as constituent organizations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UCL Centre for Digital Humanities</span>

The UCL Centre for Digital Humanities is a cross-faculty research centre of University College London. It brings together digital humanities work being done in many of the university's different departments and centres, including the library services, museums and collections. The Centre counts among the "most visible" in the field and facilitates various opportunities for study at post-graduate level, including the MA/MSc in Digital Humanities, doctoral study, and short courses as part of the Department of Information Studies.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is an international research center that works with humanities in the 21st century. A collaboration among the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities, Libraries, and Office of Information Technology, MITH cultivates research agendas clustered around digital tools, text mining and visualization, and the creation and preservation of electronic literature, digital games and virtual worlds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">European Association for Digital Humanities</span>

The European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH), formerly known as the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), is a digital humanities organisation founded in London in 1973. Its purpose is to promote the advancement of education in the digital humanities through the development and use of computational methods in research and teaching in the Humanities and related disciplines, especially literary and linguistic computing. In 2005, the Association joined the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).

Islandora is a free and open-source software digital repository system based on Drupal and integrating with additional applications, including Fedora Commons. It is open source software. Islandora was originally developed at the University of Prince Edward Island by the Robertson Library and is now maintained by the Islandora Foundation, which has a mission to, "promote collaboration through transparency and consensus building among Islandora community members, and to steward their shared vision for digital curation features through a body of software and knowledge."

The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) is the primary international professional society for digital humanities. ACH was founded in 1978. According to the official website, the organization "support[s] and disseminate[s] research and cultivate[s] a vibrant professional community through conferences, publications, and outreach activities." ACH is based in the United States, and has an international membership. ACH is a founding member of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), a co-originator of the Text Encoding Initiative, and a co-sponsor of an annual conference.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CLARIN</span>

Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure is a European Research Infrastructure Consortium founded in 2012. It comprises national consortia in and outside the European Union, consisting of institutes such as universities, research centres, libraries and public archives. The goal of the consortium is providing access to digital language data collections, to digital tools, and training material for researchers to work with the language resources.

Susan Hockey is an Emeritus Professor of Library and Information Studies at University College London. She has written about the history of digital humanities, the development of text analysis applications, electronic textual mark-up, teaching computing in the humanities, and the role of libraries in managing digital resources. In 2014, University College London created a Digital Humanities lecture series in her honour.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sebastian Rahtz</span>

Sebastian Patrick Quintus Rahtz (SPQR) was a British digital humanities information professional.

Lou Burnard is an internationally recognised expert in digital humanities, particularly in the area of text encoding and digital libraries. He was assistant director of Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) from 2001 to September 2010, when he officially retired from OUCS. Before that, he was manager of the Humanities Computing Unit at OUCS for five years. He has worked in ICT support for research in the humanities since the 1990s. He was one of the founding editors of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and continues to play an active part in its maintenance and development, as a consultant to the TEI Technical Council and as an elected TEI board member. He has played a key role in the establishment of many other activities and initiatives in this area, such as the UK Arts and Humanities Data Service and the British National Corpus, and has published and lectured widely. Since 2008 he has worked as a Member of the Conseil Scientifique for the CNRS-funded "Adonis" TGE.

References

  1. "Oxford Archive of Electronic Literature". Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing Bulletin. 5 (2): 205. 1977.
  2. IT Services, University of Oxford, UK.
  3. "Oxford Text Archive moving to the Bodleian Library | Martin Wynne". ota.hypotheses.org. 24 October 2016. Retrieved 31 August 2022.
  4. CLARIN, Europe.
  5. "Oxford Text Archive". tei-c.org. Text Encoding Initiative. Retrieved 1 September 2012.