TextGrid as a Digital Ecosystem

Abstract

The TextGrid project brings together eight German institutions from both academia and the commercial sector to "create a community grid for the collaborative editing, annotation, analysis and publication of specialist texts". Leveraging the grid infrastructure, textual data and supporting images from various research projects and content providers such as archives and libraries can fuse into a virtual corpus that can be seamlessly searched and analyzed. TextGrid will be a key enabler for collaborative textual scholarship, aiming at overcoming current isolation in research and facilitating cooperative working methods and the sharing of resources, content and software agents alike. It will also enable quantitative and comparative studies across corpora on a scale that might otherwise have been impossible to achieve.