About eComma

The eCommentary Machine web application (“eComma”) will enable 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 will marry 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 will encourage students to employ analytical skills learned in contemporary online discourse in a literary and academic context. eComma will also supply 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, will make possible a new kind of intellectual collaboration, and will have myriad uses in the expanding field of digital humanities.

About this demo

This site is an early prototype developed by Travis Brown in August 2007. This version (0.1.0) employs a custom MVC (model-view-controller) framework built on the Smarty PHP templating engine, and was completed on September 4. We are currently working on version 0.2, which will be tested in several classrooms this fall. We used CakePHP for the first round of rapid prototyping in early August, and the final product of that initial round of development previews some additional functionality that will be included in future versions, but wasn't ready for inclusion in 0.1.0.

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.

The site is currently best viewed in Firefox 2. If the site is not rendering currently from your browser, the following screenshots show some of the current functionality (click thumbnail for larger view):

We also have a short screencast on YouTube. Please contact us if you'd like to see a higher-quality version of this video.

Please contact Travis Brown for more information about the project, or to request a guest username and password.