JiTR Recipe for DHSI

JiTR: Just in Time Research collections management and analysis environment

JiTR provides a means of compiling, tracking, sharing, editing, annotating and analyzing online research collections. It makes it possible for researchers to create “mashups” or combinations of streams of texts from different sources for purposes of scholarly editing, sociolinguistic study, and literary, historical, or conceptual analysis. It is currently an alpha prototype.

Example

Someone wishes to compile, sort, and annotate a collection of online documents connected with their research, and to share it with collaborators and research assistants.

Getting Started

1. Go to the JiTR site and play the video on the home page.
2. Get Susan or Stan to set you up with an account and login at http://ra.tapor.ualberta.ca/~jitr/ .
3. Click on the Collections menu tab on the horizontal menu, select “New Collection,” and fill in a title and description of your collection. Unclick the Visibility box if you do not want your collection to be visible to others (they will not be able to edit it unless you share it with them).
4. Add texts to your collection by one or more of the following methods:
   1. Choose Add Text from the Side Bar on the Right. You can then cut and paste or type in a text. You can also paste in a URL and have JiTR go get the text for you.
   2. Using the Aggregator (under tools) you can enter multiple URLs of websites. JiTR will go and get each one and add it as an item.
   3. Using the Web Scraper you can download a page and all subpages on the same site. Again these will each become an item.
5. Once you have added some texts you should experiment with editing the metadata for items in your collection, and then try sorting the texts by different criteria. For example you can edit the Labels, the Descriptions, and the Tags.
6. Export your collection as a Report by clicking the Create Report in the side panel. A report is a new item in the Reports collection that is made up of all "Included" items in the collection the report was generated from. The Reports have unique URLs that can be passed to other tools so that you can treat the collection as a single text for searching, sharing, and analysis. Go to TAPoRware and try a tool on the report.

Advanced Tips

• Use “tags” to organize and interlink your collections.
• Use “notes” to annotate your documents. Notes are linked to the document and also stored in your Notes Collection.
• Use the XML editor to begin creating a textual edition as part of your JiTR collection.

Who has worked on creating it

JiTR has is being developed by a team led by Geoffrey Rockwell (first at McMaster University and now at the University of Alberta) in connection with the TAPoR Project, involving Susan Brown, Stan Ruecker, Stéfan Sinclair, Peter Organisciak, Kamal Ranaweera, James Chartrand, Lian Yan, and Shawn Day.

Where to read about it http://tada.mcmaster.ca/wikita/pub/Main/MashTexts/MashingTextsProposal.pdf

Availability Accounts available by arrangement with the development team.

-- GeoffreyRockwell - 16 Apr 2009

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