About Digital Texts 2.0

Digital Texts helps you to organize and share your digital texts. You can group your texts into collections, associate them with authors, assign tags and other useful metadata, and add your notes and comments. You can also join groups, see what your friends are reading, and share your texts and annotations with them.

Digital Texts 2.0 was undertaken by Dr. Stéfan Sinclair as an initiative to experiment with applying the principles of Web 2.0 to the realm of electronic texts. We intend to preserve and expose all of the existing qualities of digital texts (rich hypertextual associations, refined encoding practices, analytic affordances, etc.), while enhancing them with additional characteristics provided by Web 2.0 and social networking. Thus, it is a preliminary attempt to better understand the phenomenon of social networking and how it might be adapted to benefit the ways in which humanities scholars interact with electronic texts. More information about the research questions and methodology informing the project can be found on the Digital Texts wiki.

Development Team

Implementation

Digital Texts 2.0 is built using Ruby on Rails and the Facebook Platform. It uses the RFacebook library, as well as the Amazon Web Services, Google Books and Google Charts APIs.

Credits

• JSON encoding with the JSON gem.
• Search powered by Ferret and the acts_as_ferret plugin.
• Error notifications handled with the Exception Notifier plugin.
• Text input security handled by xss_terminate and White List.
• Textile support implemented with RedCloth.
• Natural language date processing handled with the Chronic gem.
• Pagination implemented with the will_paginate plugin.
• Modal window interface implemented with the Redbox plugin.
• Amazon interaction adapted from the AWS4R (Amazon Web Services for Ruby) library.
• Alternating Rows JavaScript by arc90 under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
• Favicon from The Crystal Project, under the LGPL.
• Silk Icons by FamFamFam under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.