Below is a representative page from Christopher Ricks’s critical edition of the poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

This excerpt from “The Lady of Shalott” illustrates traditional methods of textual collation: the base text is prominently displayed, with variants and annotations included in notes at the foot of the page. It provides a useful comparison to this screenshot of the same poem, collated in Juxta.

Two versions of the poem can be displayed in Juxta side-by-side, with a heat map of the differences (highlighted in green) making variants instantly recognizable. But in addition to these basic visualizations, the new Juxta 1.3 adds another useful feature: search.

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For all those who had trouble accessing the site this week, we’re happy to announce it’s up and running again! We apologize for the delay and encourage you to access the manual and software download pages once more.

Juxta 1.3 is now available for download here. It has the following new features:

1) Search over all documents.

A search box has been added to the toolbar, making it possible to find instances of a word or phrase within all documents in the comparison set. Those results are listed in the Search pane at the bottom of the screen (see image above). Clicking on a line in that pane will display the document and the search results. Note that Juxta will remember the last searches that were performed and show them in the search drop down list.

2) Line numbers appear for the witness and base texts.

Now, when the “toggle line numbers” menu item is selected, the line numbers appear alongside the witness text, in addition to the those coresponding to the base text.

3) “Moves”: the ability to correlate similar passages that are differently located in two documents.

The Passages feature from the last version has been reworked into the new, “Moves” feature. In the side-by-side collation view, the user may select text in both the base and the witness documents representing a passage identified as having moved (1). The move button (2) will become enabled at that point.

Click here to create the move. You will see an outline of the passages (3) and a line connecting them, with an entry made in the Moves pane (4). Clicking the entry brings the move into view.

Altogether, these features represent a significant improvement to Juxta as a textual collation tool. Download it and give it a try today!

Juxta 1.2.2 is now available for download. The major new feature in this release is an improved fragment selection mechanism and the ability to easily preview files before collating them. This functionality is accessed via the “Files” tab on the left hand panel, depicted below.

Clicking on the “Files” tab brings up a tree of the files in the currently selected base directory. Clicking on the file icon allows the scholar to select a directory from which to select files for collation.

Double clicking on files with a “txt” or “xml” extension opens them in a preview mode. The scholar can then choose to import the entire file into the collation or to highlight a fragment and pull just the highlighted fragment into the collation. Fragments carry with them the metadata and lineation from the source text, if any. This new functionality replaces the old fragment selection mode with a more integrated solution.

Wesley Raabe, a former colleague at UVA (now CLIR Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities) has written a very nice blog post describing his experiences with Juxta. He subtitles it “textual collation for dummies,” which I take as a real compliment, because Juxta was designed to open up this esoteric practice and make it easier for literary scholars to see the utility of analyzing variant texts without having to hunker over a Lindstrand Comparator or dazzle at the flashing lights of an Hinman.

Wesley also points out that Juxta accepts unmarked, plain-text (.txt) documents as a baseline for comparison. But we want to make it clear that Juxta can work with more than plain text files — and for scholars who are interested in recording even very complex line or other numbering schemes, embedding bibliographic citation information and other notes in the files, Juxta’s particular flavor of XML can be useful. Juxta XML can be constructed by hand or generated via XSLT from other XML formatted files (such as TEI). Its simple format is described beginning on page 17 of our user manual.

Why bother? Juxta XML is a great choice if you’d like the printable apparatus to be generated complete with bibliographic information and your notes, keyed to line and page or scene or chapter or canto numbers that make sense to scholars studying your particular texts.

I haven’t seen anybody do this yet, but Juxta XML would also be a nice choice for the editor of an existing archive of well-proofed XML documents of various editions to provide to end users as a download option. In that case, Juxta — in its most sophisticated form — would be plug-and-play. Even for dummies.