Repertoire

Some humanities projects call for close reading of text and image; others, a rich sense of cultural context; still others use numerical methods to unearth voices hidden by history or expose larger trends. This diversity, across disciplines and between academics, stands at the center of how Hyperstudio works with individual faculty members. We seek ways to further humanistic research using appropriate digital tools—never to subordinate your research concerns to whatever digital tools are currently “in vogue.”

The principle of diversity, that no “one size fits all,” guides the design of Hyperstudioʼs Repertoire software. Experience with multi-purpose online media repositories (like m:media) showed their usefulness in getting new faculty and students involved in digital humanities, particularly in reading across text, image, and video and participating in online discussions. However, media repositories stop short of the full immersive experience of projects that tailor the digital environment to the humanities intent—rather than the other way around. For example, the Berliner sehen projectʼs non-linear film interface enables viewers to probe specific topics and follow individual characters through real-life vignettes of Berlin, always keeping culture and film at the fore. Or, to take a project developed elsewhere: the Valley of the Shadow at University of Virginia gathered together searchable primary sources, timelines, statistics, and maps, using custom-built databases and geographic information systems to convey a balanced view of two communities on the cusp of the American Civil War.

Repertoire was conceived to allow Hyperstudio the flexibility to pursue such customizations, without re-inventing the wheel. Its purpose, in short: to put the individual professorsʼ humanities approach first.

Core Features

To enable this more flexible approach, Hyperstudio staff identified some key features:

• individual projects need their own characteristic graphic design, or “look and feel”
• since each project has a unique view of its content, it should be able to maintain custom databases
• likewise, each project should be free to implement its own collaboration or analysis code
• even if refinements take time, it should be relatively fast to get a basic project up and running
• where desired, projects should have access to each othersʼ software tools:
  • user management and collaboration
  • data visualization
  • text markup and data extraction
  • full text searching
  • faceted browsing
  • timeline display

The result is a software “ecosystem” rather than a monolithic “platform.” Individual projects make use of the modules that provide functionality they need, and ignore the rest. Hence the name “Repertoire,” a stock of digital humanities skills or proficiencies that you can mobilize as needed.

Commonalities

Repertoire projects are written in Ruby, a well-known programming language that balances ease of development with a full range of features. Most projects also build on Rails, a system for building web software that provides access to databases and tools for publishing your project to web browsers and mobile devices.

Because Repertoire relies on well-tested open source software like Ruby and Rails, it leverages the larger software communityʼs innovations and refinements. Likewise, most projects use PostgreSQL, one of the most reliable and widely-used SQL databases, to store their data. On top of this basic set of software, Repertoire modules provide functionality useful to digital humanities projects.

Below is a short description of each existing Repertoire module. As individual projects require them, more will be written. Most importantly, however, remember that Repertoire modules are intended to make writing individual projects easier where commonalities exist. The most important aspect of using Repertoire is the flexibility and ease of development that Ruby provides for implementing humanities perspectives specific to your project: the ability to invent what you need if itʼs not in the box.

In other words, Repertoire was designed to maximize your individual projectʼs options and creativity, while still providing a core set of humanities functionality.

Chronos Timeline

HyperStudio’s Chronos Timeline is designed specifically for needs in the humanities and social sciences to represent time-based data. Chronos allows scholars and students to dynamically present historical data in a flexible online environment. Switching easily between vertical and horizontal orientations, researchers can quickly scan large number of events, highlight and filter events based on subject matter or tags, and recontextualize historical data. The Chronos Timeline is one component in HyperStudio’s emerging Repertoire platform and can easily be integrated with other tools such as faceted browsers, maps, and visualization modules.

Built in JavaScript on top of an extendable object-oriented architecture, Chronos is a flexible jQuery plug-in using the powerful jQuery library. Chronos is notable for its dynamic scaling, which allows the user to drill down into time periods to explore and compare events. Chronos connects flexibly to data sources via the JSON open standard, and will support XML data structures in a future version. Repertoire Chronos Timeline is currently in beta stage and will be released as free software under the GNU General Public License. Please feel free to try out the Chronos prototypes below. Feedback is highly welcome.

http://hs-dev.mit.edu/repertoire/chronos/
http://hs-dev.mit.edu/repertoire/chronos/vertical/
http://hs-dev.mit.edu/repertoire/chronos/horizontal/

 

Faceted Browser

The Repertoire faceted browser module enables you to quickly integrate non-linear search into a project.  Faceted search is particularly useful when you would like to present users with multiple entry points into a dataset or when there is no expectation that they know what they are looking for beforehand.  For example, someone browsing Amazon.com for a gift might have not have a specific item in mind, but instead realize theyʼre looking for something under $50 for someone who enjoys cooking and prefers red appliances. Faceted browsing allows users to explore the space of potential items by choosing the refinements in any order.

As the demo application shows, Repertoireʼs faceted browser provides a full set of features.  Unlike many commercial browsers, Repertoire provides item counts for each possible result.  The results display and even the facet controls can be reprogrammed to display interactive visualizations.  And the system can scale to upwards of a million items with only minimal reconfiguration.  Together these features place the Repertoire faceted indexer in a league with commercial products.

For more information on faceted browsing, see publications by Marti Hearst at Berkeleyʼs School of Information: http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/.