We’ve recently collaborated with the Harry Ransom Center again to produce a screencast tutorial demonstrating the use of The Collaborative Rubáiyát, our eComma-driven online variorum edition of Edward FitzGerald’s five editions of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. This online tool accompanies the Ransom Center’s exhibition ‘The Persian Sensation: the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam in the West,’ which will be open through August 2009. The Ransom Center intends to maintain the Collaborative Rubáiyát after the exhibition concludes, however, and the Ransom Center staff were interested in producing a video that could display the features of the variorum edition and its user-generated annotations.

This video was produced by Lee Tran, Daniel Zmud, and Katharine Beutner, with the assistance of Molly Schwartzburg and Alicia Dietrich. The video is hosted by YouTube; please feel free to share it with others and to leave comments here or on the video’s YouTube page. You can also view the video in a larger size/in HD on the YouTube page.

We are delighted to announce that the first public installation of eComma, the Collaborative Rubáiyát, has launched.

This installation is itself a collaboration with the Harry Ransom Center and is a part of the Ransom Center’s new exhibition, The Persian Sensation: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in the West, co-curated by Molly Schwartzburg and Michelle Kaiserlian. The Collaborative Rubáiyát offers online visitors and gallery visitors the opportunity to engage in collaborative annotation of the entire fifth edition of the Rubáiyát, and to read all five editions of Edward FitzGerald’s translation in digital form. It is accessible via a dedicated computer station in the Ransom Center gallery and will remain online as a digital exhibition feature after the gallery exhibition has ended.

This installation demonstrates how institutions can employ eComma as a digital tool to inspire collaboration. The user interface for this installation matches the design template of the Ransom Center website, and it will be easy for the Ransom Center to maintain.

We have very much enjoyed working with the Ransom Center staff to put together the Collaborative Rubáiyát, and the process has been helpful for us, as well. This installation of eComma represents a big step toward a functional, downloadable 1.0 version, which we intend to roll out within the next month or two. Check back soon for more updates, and please feel free to join the conversation about the Rubáiyát!

Yesterday Travis and I gave a presentation about eComma for the Third Friday series sponsored by UT’s Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. LAITS has funded the development of eComma since its inception, and the LAITS staff have been enthusiastic supporters and advisers as we’ve proceeded with the project. We were glad to be able to give them a fuller picture of our development history and of our goals for Version 1.0. The Powerpoint presentation that Travis delivered is available here for download; we also performed a short demo using an updated version of our first solid prototype.

Following our presentation, Jim Henson from LAITS described recent updates to the Texas Politics Project, which offers a wealth of polling information about Texas to all interested researchers (and received lots of media attention during the presidential election for that very reason).

At the moment, we’re preparing eComma for its upcoming supporting role in the Ransom Center’s Spring 2009 exhibition The Persian Sensation: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in the West. The exhibition will feature a Collaborative Rubáiyát powered by eComma, accessible in the gallery and by online visitors. We’re very excited to be working with the Ransom Center to produce this interactive tool.

Sam and I had an excellent time at the NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant project directors’ meeting in Washington, D.C. The Office of Digital Humanities staff are lovely people — they seem really excited about the work they’re doing and eager to help digital humanities projects succeed. The meeting was a nice mix: informative sessions by NEH staff, presentations by the project directors present, Barcamp-style “birds of a feather” sessions, and one-on-one meetings with other grant program officers. We left with lots of new ideas for collaboration and potential new directions for eComma development.

ODH is also providing a useful new tool: a searchable Library of Funded Projects and Whitepapers. Since the Start-Up Grants are so young, few projects have whitepapers posted yet, but that will change in the next year.

In other news, we will soon complete the beta version of eComma. We’re also scheduling more classroom tests — including a distance learning class — and, with the help of a student from the iSchool, usability tests. And, like the rest of the digital humanities world, we’re hard at work on our application for the DML competition.

Thanks to Travis’s recent update, you can see some visual evidence of the work we’ve been doing this summer to produce the beta version of eComma. We’re planning a number of classroom tests for fall, and are hoping to involve students from the UT School of Information, as well, as we work to improve the application’s usability.

We will also be producing an installation of eComma for the Harry Ransom Center, to accompany their spring exhibition on The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. Our Collaborative Rubáiyát will allow visitors to the Ransom Center’s galleries and long-distance users to interact with the poem and with their fellow readers by posting questions or comments and adding tags to the poem. This interactive version of the Rubáiyát will also allow users to compare variant texts of the poem.

In late September, Sam and I will be traveling to the National Endowment for the Humanities in D.C. to attend a project directors’ meeting for Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant recipients. We’re looking forward to learning more about the other participating projects.

We’re also looking forward to the 2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition. This year’s competition theme is “Participatory Learning,” which we’re obviously pretty excited about, since eComma is designed to promote exactly that. We’re also excited to announce that Travis was recently named a HASTAC Scholar.

We are currently in the middle of a major redesign of the default theme for the eComma application, and we’ve put together some preliminary screenshots:

We’re still working out the details, but we think these changes will make the application both more visually appealing and more intuitively navigable than the previous version:


In particular we’re moving away from tab-based navigation and reducing the number of interface elements per page view.

We’re hoping to have a public demo of the new interface up and running in the next couple of weeks—in the meantime you can check out the previous demo.

eComma is a collaborative textual annotation web application being developed by a team at the University of Texas at Austin. And now we have a blog. It’s a bit spare at the moment, but we’ll be posting updates here as progress continues.

For now, you can learn more about the eComma project and about our staff.

We’re aiming for a public beta release in early fall and hope to produce version 1.0 by the end of 2008. Check in with us again soon for more information!