Open Access News

With funding from the IST programme and the US, the CHLT project developed morphological analysers, citation databases, visualisation and clustering tools, and combined them with dictionaries to aid experienced scholars, students and the general public alike. It also unified several important digital library collections – such as Isaac Newton's manuscripts in the Newton project - and early modern scientific texts, as well as creating new digital library collections of Old Norse sagas. It's a vast achievement....CHLT used leading edge techniques from computational linguistics, natural language processing, and information retrieval that enables researchers to conduct new types of scholarship. "It was a remarkably successful project between the National Science Foundation in the US and EU institutions. It generated results beyond expectations, and illustrated how essential it is to work together to create an integrated global infrastructure for scholarly research," says CHLT’s European coordinator Dolores Iorizzo from the Newton Project and the London e-Science Centre....The team wanted to find the most effective ways to use technology to interpret digitised, historic manuscripts. CHLT responds to the challenges faced by teachers, students and scholars who are working with texts written in Ancient Greek, Mediaeval and Early-Modern Latin, and Old Norse. The number of primary texts – arguably the most important resource for historians and linguists – is staggering. Hundreds of important texts and manuscripts, consisting of millions of words have been integrated into the CHLT open access repository that can also be viewed within the oldest and largest cultural heritage database in the world at the Perseus Project in Tufts University, Boston. CHLT created new text collections written in Early-Modern Latin and Old Norse. It integrated those new books and manuscripts with well-established digital texts, and it created a digital library environment that allows for high-resolution images of pages from rare and fragile printed books and manuscripts. These are presented alongside transcriptions so that the originals can be viewed alongside diplomatic and normalised versions of the material. "The early modern printed texts can be scanned to create automatically generated hypertext, but manuscripts such as those in the Newton Project must be transcribed and XML text encoded by hand which makes it very slow and painstaking," says Iorizzo....The project successfully developed a host of powerful language analysis tools that will help readers to understand texts written in these difficult languages by offering parsers, which automatically determine the grammatical identity of a word....What's more, these parsers were integrated into a digital library reading environment that automatically generates hypertext links. So a user can click on a word, register its identity and look it up in a dictionary. CHLT also built a multilingual information retrieval tool that allows users to enter queries in English and search texts written in Greek and Latin...."CHLT is a political statement. We've lowered the barrier for access to primary texts, so now it's no longer the academic elite who have access and can read these historically important manuscripts," says Iorizzo. Users can even upload their own texts for parsing and analysis. Those texts will then be added to the library so the collection will grow organically over time....CHLT supports Open Access and Berlin Declaration policies, and has negotiated a free open-access agreement with Cambridge University Press for an electronic edition of the Greek-English lexicon to be published online simultaneously with the print edition; it has also explored ways that these tools can be used and shared across cooperating digital libraries.