This acronym THREAD (Toolkit for Humanities Research and Editing of Ancient Documents) is intended to evoke both connectedness (with texts as woven fabrics and this toolkit sewing them together), and sequence (with the workflow stringing one stage to the next). Although many tools already exist to produce and publish digital editions of texts as well as mark them up so they can be used as the basis for further research, often the scholars seeking to produce these digital texts are unaware of the available tools. Furthermore, such tools tend to be difficult to use together because they were developed for a specific project and therefore lack the flexibility or generality to be used for other texts. The result is that we have been working in isolated “silos,” wastefully using our limited resources to repeat much work that has already been done.
Many researchers of ancient texts are convinced that our work can advance much more productively if we work together to develop and share tools that are flexible and reusable, tools that work together easily across different projects and corpora. Therefore my objective for this platform is to produce a unified toolset for a comprehensive workflow appropriate for ancient texts. This involves two tasks: unifying the existing tools by adapting them to communicate with one another, and designing and writing new tools for those stages of the workflow that are not yet well supported. It also requires publicize the tools across the spectrum of humanities disciplines that process ancient texts. The net result should be that scholars of antiquity are able to do more work more easily on the ancient texts we find so fascinating.
The end goal is a comprehensive platform for digital humanities textual scholarship in general. The platform will consist of a set of independent but interoperable software modules, each of which performs a specific task. Each module can be used by itself, with the ability to import and export XML that conforms to the TEI standard. Each module will also be accessible through a standard web services API, allowing them to work together as a single software suite. In some cases, a module will simply be a “wrapper” around existing tools, allowing them to talk to one another.