Our project

The eCommentary Machine project (eComma) is based at the University of Texas at Austin. We are funded by UT’s Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services and by the National Endowment for the Humanities (via a Level II Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the Office of Digital Humanities).

eComma is a web application that enables groups of students, scholars, or general readers to build collaborative commentaries on a text and to search, display, and share those commentaries online.

Despite the proliferation of electronic texts and the development of sophisticated content management systems like Drupal and Blackboard and tagging systems like del.icio.us, few online humanities text programs have used these new methods of sharing data to create truly collaborative analytical tools for humanities study. Most humanities texts online make no provision for adding comments, tags, and other metadata, or combine this metadata to produce a single, heavily moderated text and commentary.

As a text and commentary management system, eComma can be used not only to assemble total collations of texts but, crucially, to allow teams of students and researchers to analyze texts in a transparently collaborative and exploratory manner. In other words, eComma marries the intuitive communication allowed by Web 2.0-style technology with the academic precision of current electronic editing standards.

Building on the University of Texas at Austin’s pedagogical tradition of innovative computer-based learning, eComma encourages students to employ analytical skills learned in contemporary online discourse in a literary and academic context. eComma also supplies researchers and collaborative community groups with the tools to share and compare their commentaries on texts or group projects and to build sophisticated “readings” of a text that incorporate the observations of all project members. The eComma application, designed to be modular, replicable, and scalable, makes possible a new kind of intellectual collaboration, and will have myriad uses in the expanding field of digital humanities.

Current version

You can explore the current demo version of eComma (0.2.0) here. This page also features an embedded version of our Youtube screencast. (Contact us if you’d like to see a higher-quality version of this video.) For a more extensive description of the history, development, and goals of the eComma project, see this Powerpoint presentation, originally delivered at the LAITS Third Friday session on November 21, 2008.

This demo is an early prototype developed by Travis Brown between August 2007 and March 2008. This version (0.2.0) employs a custom MVC (model-view-controller) framework built on the Smarty PHP templating engine, and was used in our initial classroom tests in the spring semester of 2008. Travis Brown, Will McCutchen, and James Calcaben are currently working on a new version that will be tested in a range of classes in the fall. We used CakePHP for the first round of rapid prototyping in early August 2007, and the final product of that initial round of development previews some additional functionality that will be included in future versions.

All texts and annotations are stored in a MySQL relational database using a range-based data model, which allows us to produce well-formed XML on demand without hard-coding unrealistic assumptions about our data into our database.