Juxta User Manual

Getting Started

The Juxta installation includes several sample collations, which can be accessed from the File menu. Select “File”, then “Open Sample”
(File->Open Sample) and then select a JXT file for the sample you wish to view.

The four sample collations are:

Damozel—a collation of seven versions of the poem “The Blessed Damozel” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Demonstrates the use of Juxta XML files to associate images and milestones with text.

Hamlet—a collation of three early texts of William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Demonstrates using Juxta on large texts with highly variant spellings.

Renaissance—a collation of two versions of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Demonstrates the collation of prose texts.

The Orchard Pit—a collation of two versions of Rossetti’s “The Orchard Pit”, demonstrating another prose text collation.

The Display Window, General. Opening a collation displays a list of witness documents on the left (in the Comparison Explorer panel) and on the right a transcription of one of the witness texts as the “base text” (at the beginning, it chooses the first of the listed witnesses). At the top is a menu with a set of standard editing functions for adding and removing witnesses, and for several other operations. Below this menu is a toolbar with a set of icons. Running the mouse over them displays the functions they perform. There is also an input box for entering words to search for in all the texts in the comparison set. See the section on searching below.

The upper panel at the right (Document Panel) displays a transcription of the base text. If the small (right) function box below the panel is clicked, the window splits to allow a comparison of texts to be displayed. The two small boxes above the text display area allow one to choose the comparison pair. The base text is always the left of the two. The lock icon between these two boxes (by default, “on”) can be clicked to unlock so that the comparison text transcription can be independently scrolled.

The lower right panel is an area for displaying any annotations that have been made to the texts. Just below this lower right panel are four buttons that allow the user to control which information is displayed for the panel. When Juxta starts, “Notes” is displayed, which displays the user's annotations. The two small icons at the lower right allow the user to unlock the notes from their related transcriptions or to remove the notes. “Images” sets the panel to display any digital images for the transcriptions, if they were included in the initial data. Like the notes, these images can be unlocked from their transcriptions in the panel above. In addition, the images can be zoomed in and out using the two small icons which appear at the bottom of the “Images” tab. The “Moves” button displays all the moves that the user has specified. Clicking on a move scrolls the documents to display the moved text. The trash can icon removes the currently selected move. Please see the section on creating moves, below. The "Search" button displays the results of the last search operation. Clicking on a search item scrolls the texts to display the item in context.

Collating and Annotating Operations, General. Clicking a witness text on the left will make that the base text. The box at the left of each witness text can be unchecked to remove it from the collation. The boxes to the right of each witness text visualize (in shades of blue) the global degree of difference between the base text and this witness, with degree of difference signaled by increase in the gradient color difference.

In the right display panel, a "heat map" is superimposed (in blue) on the base text. Blue highlighting signals degrees of variance of the base text from the witnesses being compared. Clicking anywhere on the heat map produces a list of variants in a box in the right margin. You can also left-click and drag the mouse to highlight a region and display all of the variants for the highlighted section. Clicking on the star in the pop up box allows you to enter annotations for that difference.

You can create a new comparison set (File->New Comparison Set) and then add your own documents (Edit->Add Document). Documents must either be in a specific XML format – described later in this document – or in a plain text format. Loading a document automatically collates it using the current collation settings.

Once the material has been collated, you can analyze the results, comparing differences among documents and interpreting the data.

When you are ready to publish your work from Juxta, you can output a critical apparatus as an HTML document (File->Generate Critical Apparatus). You can also save your comparison set (File->Save or File->Save As) for later work or for sharing with others who use Juxta. These outputs preserve all notes and annotations that have been created during the editorial operation.

Collating passages that appear out of order. In the side-by-side difference view, indicate the moved passage by dragging the mouse over the passage in both the base and the witness texts. The move button (on the upper right, next to the selection of the witness text) will become enabled when text on both sides have been selected. Click the move button and the move will be created. You will see an outline of the passages and a line connecting them. There is also an entry in the Moves pane for each move created. Clicking the entry brings the move into view.

Searching in all text. Juxta's search feature allows you to find a word or phrase in all the texts in the current collation set. Type the search terms you want in the input box that appears on the tool bar and press the enter key (or click in the icon to right of the input box). The results are displayed in the Search panel, and all the matching terms are highlighted in the texts. Clicking on a search result in the Search panel causes it to scroll into view. The search works for whole words only, so if you search for "work", for example, the term "working" will not be found. If you search for more than one word, then it finds them in any order, as long as they appear close to each other in the text. For instance, searching for "question be" in Hamlet will return (among other results) "be, that is the question".

Next Page >