TAPoR will build a unique human and computing infrastructure for text analysis across the country by establishing six regional centers to form one national text analysis research portal. This portal will be a gateway to tools for sophisticated analysis and retrieval, along with representative texts for experimentation. The local centers will include text research laboratories with best-of-breed software and full-text servers that are coordinated into a vertical portal for the study of electronic texts. Each center will be integrated into its local research culture and, thus, some variation will exist from center to center.

Each local center will have a laboratory available to the research community at the participating university. The laboratory will be at least 100 square feet in size and will house 5 networked workstations with scanners, media acquisition devices, and software. The software suite will include software to scan documents, optical character recognition (OCR) software to create electronic texts from images of documents, multimedia manipulation software for media associated with texts, software for encoding texts with structural and interpretative information, personal computer text analysis tools, and exporting tools for transferring electronic texts to the server in standard forms like XML (extensible markup language) and PDF (portable document format). The laboratories at individual sites will vary as they are integrated into the local research culture.

Each center will run a text server for the local community and the region. This server will have the disk space (half a terabyte per server) to store large, media-rich text databases and it will be configured to be easy to maintain and capable of sustaining significant use. The servers will run locally developed text tools and a suite of common tools available to all users through an open research portal. For projects that are sharing electronic texts with a wider research community and need reliable access, there will be mirroring of functionality and resources between servers, thus allowing projects to scale from the local to public access.

PORTAL: A key element of TAPoR is the vertical portal that will be developed for unified access to the resources and tools. The portal will handle security, access and rights management; provide an e-commerce-like application for the management of e-texts; facilitate the interconnectivity of the six servers including the interoperability among the text databases; and provide a common global access to TAPoR that can be linked to international partners. TAPoR will make the best practices of experienced computing humanists available to the larger humanities research community through this portal.

Each center will provide local expertise to the portal. The University of Toronto will have two labs; one will be an interaction lab for capturing video, audio, screen shots and eye gaze of test users for researching usability of text applications and digital library solutions, and the second lab will be a lexical analysis lab. The University of Victoria will have a multimedia laboratory suitable for research into multimedia enrichment and acquisition because many texts, to be of use to the research community, need embedded multimedia evidence. The University of New Brunswick will have a lab that specializes in metadata for resource discovery. Université de Montréal will have a lab focused on public access and intellectual property issues around legal documents. At The University of Alberta, a new computing research lab is planned in association with Gary Kelly, the new, distinguished senior Canadian Research Chair. This will enable the production, archiving, and distribution of electronic texts, through the TAPoR portal, under the general heading of “Culture and the Modern State.” At McMaster University we will have facilities related to the portal development and maintenance.

This infrastructure will provide a giant leap forward for humanities researchers and will be unique to this country. It will provide local centers across Canada with a common interface to e-text resources and a common workbench for text analysis tools. Additionally, it will be flexible enough to be customized for particular projects and training needs. This infrastructure will enable a coherent approach to the training of new humanities scholars and personnel. It will create a collaborative network of humanists working to adapt computing techniques to the study of electronic texts. It will foster the development of new methods of analysis and enhance our ability to play a more significant global role in the advancement of humanities research. Moreover, TAPoR will transform how research results are transferred to the private sector and embedded in products such as document and content management systems, web search engines, personalization software and intelligent agents.