TextGrid

TextGrid was a joint project developed from 2005-2015 and consisting of ten institutional and university partners

TextGrid was one of the five academic community projects that have been building a sustainable grid infrastructure in Germany since September 2005 as part of the D-Grid network with the D-Grid integration project in order to make information and knowledge technologies usable for science in a decentralized manner.

TextGrid has been offered by the supporting institutions of DARIAH-DE since 2015 and forms an important part of the services of the Association for Research Infrastructures in the Humanities and Cultural Studies. TextGrid is being further developed as part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI).

The development of a virtual research environment for the humanities and cultural studies was a response to increasing demand from the humanities for digital tools, particularly for philological editing and collaborative work. The improved version 2.0 of the TextGrid software has been available to download free of charge since summer 2012.

The focus of the third funding phase (2012-2015) was the establishment of sustainable continuous operation: the software, archive and thus the entire service are to be put on a long-term user basis in cooperation with users, scholars and learned societies. The supporting institutions of DARIAH-DE are now ensuring this long-term operation. The TextGrid Reposiotry is further developd within the NFDI consortium Text+.

The TextGrid virtual research environment is optimized for the digital indexing of humanities sources and their long-term archiving in a web archive, especially TEI-coded resources; it also supports the publication of data in an external portal. TextGrid offers two main components for this purpose: The TextGrid Laboratory (TextGrid Lab), a software (tools and services) for the digital indexing of humanities source material, supports humanities scholars throughout the entire research process - source materials can be created, edited, tagged with metadata and prepared for digital and analog publication in a decentralized and collaborative manner. Other open source tools and services optimized for TextGrid can be integrated via a “Market Space” integrated into the Lab. The TextGrid Repository (TextGrid Rep), which has been awarded the CoreTrustSeal, is a public long-term scientific archive. It guarantees the long-term availability and accessibility of humanities research data and materials that can be stored, published, visualized and searched sustainably, securely and in accordance with international standard formats.

Target groups:

1. Academics who work on research projects such as digital editions with TextGrid.
2. Developers who adapt TextGrid tools and services for their own projects or integrate external services and tools into TextGrid.
3. Research projects and institutions that archive data in TextGrid and make it accessible (repository).

The underlying vision of a digital ecosystem is based on the further development of the open source concept and is intended to enable the free exchange of individual components and specific adaptations according to the needs of the specialist communities.