2008 TADA Research Evaluation eXchange (T-REX)

TADA (the Text Analysis Developers' Alliance) announces a new text analysis event: a multi-category "best ideas" type competition intended to stimulate innovation in text analysis and encourage connections between users and developers.

Competition Categories

Best New Tool
An award for the best Web Service or REST text tool. Consideration will be given to innovation and fulfilling a need in the Digital Humanities community. Though the tools will be judged on their functional and conceptual merits, we expect that authors will be willing to publish their code under an appropriate open source license. Submissions should include a link to the tool, summary documentation about using it, and a short statement about it.
Best Idea for a New Tool
An award for the best idea for a new tool that can be implemented on the web as a Web Service or REST tool. This is similar to the previous category (with emphasis on innovation and responding to a need), but no implementation is required for this category. Submissions should include a fairly detailed description of what the tool would do and how it would function (from the user's perspective); it may also include sketches and/or pseudo code (but neither is required).
Best Idea for Improving a Current Tool
This award will recognize the best idea for improving a tool currently registered in the TAPoR Portal. Submissions should provide a fairly detailed description of a single enhancement – big or small, but feasible – of the tool's interface or functioning, and consideration will be given to creativity and usefulness. Submissions may also include sketches and/or pseudo code (but neither is required).
Best Idea for Improving the Interface of the TAPoR Portal
This award will recognize the best idea for improving the interface of the TAPoR Portal (not any of the tools in particular, but the interface of the Portal itself). Submissions should provide a fairly detailed description of the proposed improvement (including an explanation of why it would be an improvement), and consideration will be given to creativity and usefulness. Submissions may also include sketches, though they are not required.
Best Experiment of Text Analysis Using High Performance Computing
This category is intended to encourage experimentation of text analysis development within a high performance computing (or grid) architecture. Consideration will be given to innovation and future promise of the application or technique. Submissions should include a fairly detailed description of the experiment, the environment in which it was developed, and the corpus used. If applicable, submissions should also include code (with an open source license).

Competition Guidelines

Participants should submit entries by e-mail to trex@tapor.ca. You can submit more than one entry.
Participants are expected to have a TAPoR account with a functioning email address to which we can respond.
Entries will be judged by a team including Geoffrey Rockwell, Susan Schreibman, Stéfan Sinclair, Michael Bauer, and Stephen Downie. The judges reserve the right to award multiple prizes for each category or none at all.
In the case of Ideas for New Tools it is understood that the submitter authorizes members of TADA to implement the idea and that they will not expect any compensation other than appropriate acknowledgement.
By submitting it is understood that you give members of TADA a non-exclusive license to post the idea (with appropriate recognition) on the TADA site. It is also understood that if you are submitting an idea, bug report, or feature idea, that you give members of TADA a non-exclusive license to implement the idea or fix the bug.

Prizes

Winning entries will get small Canadian-themed prizes (think genuine maple syrup) and will be publicly acknowledged both in announcements, documentation and any publications resulting (including in the Digital Humanities Quarterly). OpenSky Solutions is our prize sponsor.

Timeline

Competition closes June 30th, 2008
Announcements by July 20, 2008

Future