Aus-e-Lit: Collaborative Integration and Annotation Services for Australian Literature Communities

The Aus-e-Lit project is a NeAT-funded project that aims to address the eResearch needs of researchers involved in the study of Australian literature and Australian print culture. The project will enhance and extend the existing AustLit web portal with:

project architecture

Compound Object Authoring and Publishing

OAI-ORE objects relate multiple resources from disparate databases within a single compound object. They are useful for modelling provenance of literary resources and for online learning objects for teaching and research. The Aus-e-Lit project has implemented a Firefox extension, LORE (Literature Object Re-use and Exchange) that will enable Austlit community members to create / author OAI-ORE compliant Compound Objects, publish them, edit them and search and retrieve them.

Install LORE from Firefox Add-Ons site. LORE is released under the GPL 3.0. Get LORE from GitHub.

OAI-ORE authoring tool

LORE: Literature Object Re-use and Exchange

Watch a demonstration of LORE

Collaborative Annotation Services

The Aus-e-Lit annotation services will enable communities of experts to collaboratively select, tag and annotate digital resources with:

  • keywords
  • notes
  • comments
  • interpretations
  • queries
  • links to related resources etc.
and to share these annotations with the research community to enrich the collection and enhance discovery services.

The Aus-e-Lit project uses the Danno Annotation Service. An annotation client has been implemented as part of LORE.

Annotations

Editing an annotation

Data Integration and Search

The project will enable AustLit users to seamlessly search across a small number of relevant databases and archives to retrieve reliable information on a particular author, topic or publication. The envisaged service will be a federated search interface (available through the AustLit portal) that enables searching across a number of databases relevant to Australian literature, such as:

See the Federated Search and Full Text Search pages at AustLit for more information.

Empirical Reporting Services

AustLit researchers increasingly want to enter queries that combine text search with empirical analysis to generate graphical reports. For example:

"Show me how many articles contain the phrase 'tyranny of distance' between 1966 and 2000"

Graphs

See more examples of graphical reports and visualisations.