Good news!  Google has offered its support to help us develop Juxta into a web application:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-commitment-to-digital-humanities.html

We are thrilled to have received this competitive award, and look forward to working to optimize Juxta for the web.

Here is an abstract of our application for the Google Award:

With the support of a Google Digital Humanities Research Award, we propose to transform Juxta into a web-based application integrated with Google Books. Scholars could use such a tool to track changes in language over time and to test literary and historical theories through comparative analysis of texts.

As the largest single part of the general remediation of the global library to digital formats, the 12,000,000+ books digitized by Google represent a major opportunity for scholars interested in the history of texts and editions. We want to know how Charles Dickens and Henry James changed their novels as they went through different editions in their lifetimes; and we also want to see the changes introduced by later editors, in later printings.  We want to collate versions of poems published by Sylvia Plath and Walt Whitman to discover their revisions.  We want to compare digital texts of uncertain origin with known versions, as a mode of authentication.

Using Juxta, a scholar can answer these questions and many more. Juxta comes with several kinds of analytic visualizations. The primary collation gives a split frame comparison of a base text with a witness text, along with a display of the digital images from which the base text is derived. Juxta displays a heat map of all textual variants and allows the user to locate all witness variations from the base text. The histogram visualization displays the density of all variation from the base text and serves as a useful finding aid for specific variants.

A web based Juxta would be very similar in function to the Juxta desktop application. Scholars could upload texts into a private storage area and compare them against books from the Google Books corpus. The scholar could also embed the collation into their own website (as with Google Maps) with an HTML code snippet that we will generate. Our goal would be to eventually integrate Juxta directly into the Google Books interface, allowing scholars to compare any two books for which they have access to the full text.

Now that Juxta 1.3 has been refined and released, the development team at NINES has been discussing new directions for the software. First and foremost is the adaptation of Juxta’s collating power for texts in languages other than English. Comparisons of texts in French and Italian work pretty well, but we’re still investigating the necessary diacritics to make such operations more exact. However, it seems that scholars working with non-Roman alphabets have been left out of the conversation.

Do any Juxta users out there have any experiences with foreign language collation to share with us?

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.