Pliny Workbench with WordHoard

1. Welcome

Welcome to the Pliny Workbench project homepage. This subproject of the Pliny project aims to explore what I have often described as Pliny's second agenda: the way to think about software development for humanities tools that promotes a more intimate interaction between those tools.

We explored this issue by bringing together elements of Northwestern University's WordHoard project with Pliny. Here is a screen shot of the two parts operating together:

This project was carried out by extending Pliny, and repackaging of WordHoard:

  • The extended version of Pliny, called here the Pliny Workbench, as well as supporting annotation and notetaking as base Pliny does, supports mechanisms to allow new tools to be downloaded over the Internet into its Workbench, and,
  • A prototype of a tool that can be installed: an implementation of a significant part of Northwestern University's WordHoard software.

Find out more about Pliny Workbench and WordHoard for Pliny by reading the following sections:

Acknowledgements

Funds to allow the development of Pliny Workbench and the WordHoard plugin came from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, when it awarded KCL one of its MATC awards in late 2008. I wish to thank the Mellon Foundation for making this possible.

I also wish to acknowledge my colleagues in CCH/.DDH, Timothy Hill and Payman Labbaf, who did a significant amount of the programming for the WordHoard plugin.

Finally I wish to acknowledge Prof Martin Mueller and the team of developers at Northwestern University who originally developed WordHoard, and have offered useful comments and support to this effort.


John Bradley
Center for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London