Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TInTraMaC (Tool for the Analysis of Information Transfer in Manuscript Cultures)
Reporting period: 2023-08-01 to 2025-01-31
There are multiple scholars, in a broad range of disciplines, who are studying the transmission of textually encoded information in manuscripts. These manuscripts may be of different types, from different time-periods, containing texts in different languages, but the scholars working on them still confront many of the same issues in their research when trying to keep track of, and analyze, their materials. In recent years there has been a steady increase in the number of research projects in the humanities tackling large textual corpora, a trend that has been facilitated by the new research opportunities created by the rise of digital humanities including the development of digital databases and the application of advanced analytical methods to analyze such data. However, due to the inherent complexities of such undertakings, and the resources required to establish large-scale and often complex databases, the threshold for researchers with limited resources to implement such methods can seem daunting. Researchers with limited means therefore still often decide to use traditional methods instead, and scale down their research questions, rather than trying to scale the barrier of limited knowledge of the available digital tools, limited skills in utilizing them, and limited resources to get such projects off the ground. Moreover, researchers in the humanities who do implement advanced digital humanities methods, often spend an excess of resources reinventing the wheel and suffer reduced productivity as a consequence.
This project was thus launched with the aim of creating a free, open-source, and user-friendly research tool for scholars studying information transfer in handwritten textual corpora. It is based on the methodology developed in the ERC Consolidator Grant project APOCRYPHA, which was designed to study specifically the development and transmission of Coptic apocrypha in their manuscript contexts. The goal of TInTraMaC, on the other hand, is to use what was learned in that process and distil it into a general, flexible, low-threshold research tool that could help scholars with little or no experience with digital humanities to implement such methods with minimal investment of time and resources.
This project was thus launched with the aim of creating a free, open-source, and user-friendly research tool for scholars studying information transfer in handwritten textual corpora. It is based on the methodology developed in the ERC Consolidator Grant project APOCRYPHA, which was designed to study specifically the development and transmission of Coptic apocrypha in their manuscript contexts. The goal of TInTraMaC, on the other hand, is to use what was learned in that process and distil it into a general, flexible, low-threshold research tool that could help scholars with little or no experience with digital humanities to implement such methods with minimal investment of time and resources.
The project was implemented according to plan.
The main achievement of the project was the completion of the TInTraMaC research tool which constitutes the main intended output of the project. This tool consists of both data-input table templates in the form of Excel files, as well as a detailed user guide which contains information on how to set up and implement the tool. It details how to input data into the templates, how to employ the included python codes created in order to convert the Excel files into an SQL database, more specifically PostreSQL database (which is free and open-source) and an introduction to querying the database using the database administration tool pgAdmin (which is also free and open-source). A sample case study was conducted, where a database for the study of Coptic sales documents was developed using the TInTraMaC tool, which was used to test and improve the TInTraMac tool and which will also be made available to users as an example of how to set up a database using TInTraMaC following the instructions in the user guide. The tool can now be freely downloaded and used by all interested scholars.
The TInTraMaC was developed by Samuel Cook (DO) and Hugo Lundhaug (PI) in collaboration with the IT department at the University of Oslo, represented by Knut Waagan. In addition, several meetings were conducted with test-users in order to present the basics of the tool, and to obtain feedback on usability and any features that they wished to be included which we may otherwise have overlooked. The TInTraMaC tool was consequently modified on the basis of these meetings. This also helped us make the TInTraMaC tool even more flexible for use also with text-carrying objects other than manuscripts, while still keeping the tool manuscript-centred.
The main achievement of the project was the completion of the TInTraMaC research tool which constitutes the main intended output of the project. This tool consists of both data-input table templates in the form of Excel files, as well as a detailed user guide which contains information on how to set up and implement the tool. It details how to input data into the templates, how to employ the included python codes created in order to convert the Excel files into an SQL database, more specifically PostreSQL database (which is free and open-source) and an introduction to querying the database using the database administration tool pgAdmin (which is also free and open-source). A sample case study was conducted, where a database for the study of Coptic sales documents was developed using the TInTraMaC tool, which was used to test and improve the TInTraMac tool and which will also be made available to users as an example of how to set up a database using TInTraMaC following the instructions in the user guide. The tool can now be freely downloaded and used by all interested scholars.
The TInTraMaC was developed by Samuel Cook (DO) and Hugo Lundhaug (PI) in collaboration with the IT department at the University of Oslo, represented by Knut Waagan. In addition, several meetings were conducted with test-users in order to present the basics of the tool, and to obtain feedback on usability and any features that they wished to be included which we may otherwise have overlooked. The TInTraMaC tool was consequently modified on the basis of these meetings. This also helped us make the TInTraMaC tool even more flexible for use also with text-carrying objects other than manuscripts, while still keeping the tool manuscript-centred.
The TinTraMaC Proof of Concept project was created to remedy the situation described above. It is specifically designed to enable scholars to easily trace the geographical and diachronic spread and development of textually transmitted information, concepts, and ideas. It can be applied to a wide range of manuscripts, texts, languages, and genres. In concrete terms, TInTraMaC is a package that consists of detailed user guide, a basic data model, a set of tables, and a small number of Python scripts to enable the import of data from the tables into a dedicated relational database application such as PostgreSQL. The user guide also gives pointers as to how this data may be queried using SQL scripts, and explains how to export data for further analysis using other applications for statistical or network analysis, such as R, Python, or Gephi.