News
The TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS) is getting close to its public launch in spring 2014. In preparation we are seeking participants to help us with another round of beta testing. We are particularly interested in small to moderate-sized collections of TEI data.
Since our last beta testing period in April 2013, we have refined and expanded our search and exploration interfaces, streamlined the data management workflows, and improved the reading interface. We’ve also done extensive performance testing and enhancement.
TAPAS is now entering its second week of this final beta-testing phase. Participants are providing valuable feedback about the usability of the service to help us prepare for launch later this year. It’s not too late to take part in this test; if you are interested in participating please register here: http://bit.ly/ufjOFO.
You can now find TAPAS in DHCommons! We're still interested in recruiting beta-testers and contributors of test TEI data as we start to develop the TAPAS schemas. In addition, we're open to expressions of interest from collaborators with interface design experience, and in particular from anyone interested in helping us develop user interface tools. The main repository architecture of TAPAS will be built by the internal TAPAS team, but we welcome ideas and assistance as we start to think about ways to disseminate and visualize TAPAS data.
On Friday, November 7, 2014, Benjamin J. Doyle (TAPAS project manager) was invited to speak about the TAPAS project with a group of faculty, staff, and students at the University of Connecticut. TAPAS was included as one of three Northeastern University based digital humanities projects to participate in the “Conversations in Digital Scholarship,” an ongoing discussion series on the digital humanities through UConn’s Scholars Collaborative (http://scholarscollab.uconn.edu/conversations-in-digital-scholarship/).
The TAPAS project has just wrapped-up its inaugural TAPAS workshop at the TEI 2014 conference at Northwestern University. We are very pleased with the turn-out for the event, and grateful for the enthusiastic response and feedback we received from the broader TEI community across the conference and from the participants during the workshop. It was a pleasure for all on the TAPAS team to have the opportunity to introduce TAPAS to such a supportive and critically engaged community of TEIrs!
The TAPAS project team is excited to announce an inaugural TAPAS workshop to be held on October 25, 2014 immediately following this year’s TEI conference at Northwestern University (October 22-24). This one-day workshop, led by Syd Bauman and Julia Flanders, will introduce participants to the full range of TAPAS services, including archiving and sharing TEI files through the TAPAS commons, experimenting with TEI data through integrated TAPAS data transformation tools, and composing complex TEI projects and collections for publication on the TAPAS site.
We are thrilled to announce that, in preparation for the much awaited public launch of TAPAS (Fall 2014), we have invited TEI project teams to begin using our TEI repository, transformation, and publication services. We would like to welcome this group to the TAPAS community and thank them for contributing to the project! We are very excited by the projects this community of early adopters is developing in TAPAS, projects coming from both North America and Europe.
We are delighted to announce that TAPAS has received a new three-year award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the development of the TAPAS repository. This $300,000 Preservation and Access grant will enable TAPAS to develop a repository architecture for TAPAS that can serve as a long-term storage mechanism, interact seamlessly with the user interface layer of TAPAS, and provide a basis for complex XML-aware operations such as data analysis and visualization.
As the TAPAS project approaches its soft launch in early 2014, members of TAPAS and the TEI board of directors held a panel presentation at the annual TEI conference in Rome on October 5, 2013 to report on progress and seek feedback from members of the TEI community. Julia Flanders gave an overview of the project's development progress which includes beta-testing, load testing, and improvement of the TEI reading interface in fall 2013. Syd Bauman discussed the process of data profiling and the development of TAPAS schemas.
We are now in our second week of beta testing the TAPAS user interface, with 27 individuals from 25 institutions and 8 countries currently participating.
This testing exercise is focusing on the basic features of the site, including:
- reading and browsing projects, collections, and documents
- creating user account and projects
- creating collections and upload TEI files
- basic configuration of TAPAS publications
- reporting bugs and making feature requests