The Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) is a collaboration of research units at six Canadian universities, to build a centralized gateway to representative electronic texts and text analysis tools. TAPoR@UVic has focussed on the creation and analysis of texts in varied electronic media, encouraging standardized digitisation of Humanities research resources, provoking new (inter)disciplinary research and research questions by interrelating large databases with new search and retrieval tools, and supporting and reflecting research into human-computer interface and interaction issues.
Working within the Humanities Computing and Media Centre, TAPoR offers research infrastructure consisting of a high performance server system with both production and development environments, a research lab in which 8 text and multimedia workstations reside, and access to programming expertise in the form of 3 full-time TAPoR database and tools developers, and resident HCMC programming staff. A partner scanning/digitizing workstation resides in the McPherson Library Special Collections Dept. The infrastructure is available to host and develop research projects using text, text encoding, multimedia creation and encoding, text transformation, and a variety of open source XML and native database technologies. The programming staff assist researchers with technical developments necessary to support and advance the projects. Visit the protocols and application page for more informtation.
Key research associated with TAPoR@UVic include that being carried out in conjunction with the Internet Shakespeare Editions, the Robert Graves Diary, the Devonshire Manuscript, viHistory, the London Map project, the Katakana Database, the Nxa'amxcin Dictionary, Le mariage sous l'Ancien régime, and the MacClure House project. TAPoR@UVic is also a key sponsor of the Digital Humanities / Humanities Computing Summer Institute and has produced the following publications associated with the projects.
Key computing developments to date include the the now available Image Mark-up tool , Transformer, the eXist Initiative, and the code libraries assocatied with a number of innovative technologies having multiple and (inter)disciplinary application.
TAPoR has had a major catalyzing effect on text analysis and electronic text scholarship at the existing partner institutions. At each participating institution, TAPoR has supported ongoing projects and spawned or enabled several new ones. A conservative estimate would indicate that the "halo effect" of TAPoR (for the more than 55 projects directly benefiting from TAPoR infrastructure) includes some 150 researchers, who have garnered more than eight million dollars in additional research funds (primarily through Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), hired more than 135 research assistants, and produced in excess of 400 publications and conference presentations; all of these successes meet or exceed our initial projections. The effect of the TAPoR infrastructure on digital humanities scholarship in Canada has been profoundly transformative.
TAPoR II developments at UVic will have their underpinning in a series of projects that have quite naturally evolved from UVic's mandate as the 'multimedia' node from the outset of the TAPoR partnership. TAPoR II will see movement in a series of projects involving the development of large, varied-media datasets toward application in high-performance computing. These group into clusters, consisting of [1] textbase-oriented projects, [2] multimedia database projects, and [3] GIS-related projects - all of which are interrelated via the way in which they will require a deeper understanding of issues related to [4] large-scale interrelation issues and the application to them of practices associated with high-performance computing. The best of the research that will be facilitated by this infrastructure will provide open access to their research results. Further, they will also see a broadening of individual collaborative research relationships - extended beyond the campus to researchers at Malaspina U-C (Nanaimo), UBC (Vancouver), Simon Fraser U (Vancouver), Canadian Mennonite U (Winnipeg), and Northern Michigan U (Marquette) - and collaborative research group relationships and extra-academic partnerships spanning the country, the continent, and the globe.