Leeds Electronic Text Centre

Support for Project Applications

The primary aim of the Leeds Electronic Text Centre (LETC) is to provide support for projects involving digital content in the Arts and Humanities, and for researchers - especially those in the Faculty of Arts at Leeds - who are planning such projects. We have considerable experience in advising on project organisation and preparing grant applications (e.g. to the AHRC and the British Academy), in particular the “Technical Appendix” that is typically required. Feedback from such applications has universally been positive on all technical aspects, enabling researchers to focus on academic content without anxiety that their bid might fail through inadequate technical expertise.

Technical Support for Projects

The LETC is able to deliver high quality technical support for projects involving researchers at the University of Leeds. Software design and implementation is overseen by Peter Millican, who has over 20 years of relevant software engineering experience, specialising in the creation of user-friendly systems that maximise researcher efficiency. Such systems have played a crucial role in our two current major projects funded by the AHRC - FRAME and CHOP - enabling researchers to input data quickly and reliably. Both are now resulting in powerful web databases, implemented by Henry Merivale using the best available technologies for maintainability and data preservation. Alongside such databases, we can also support projects involving sophisticated text handling, as in the Hume project described below.

Electronic Texts

Standards and technologies for handling electronic texts have advanced considerably in recent years, bringing corresponding benefits in text standardisation, maintainability, and display flexibility. Currently we are building on these developments with our work on www.davidhume.org, a growing internet resource for those with an interest in the eighteenth century philosopher and historian David Hume. Here authoritative texts of Hume’s main works, prepared from the original editions and manuscripts by Peter Millican and Henry Merivale, are systematically marked up (in accordance with the relevant protocols etc.) to enable them to be displayed in a variety of formats, suitable for a range of research and teaching purposes.

Documentation

For those who wish to keep abreast of the technical standards and developments that we use in our work, we provide links to the relevant Documentation. A cross-referenced Glossary, explaining terminology relating to the use and creation of electronic text, is also maintained. (Note that terms which appear in bold red throughout the site are links to the relevant glossary entry.) In addition to these materials, there is a Resource List for links to other information available on the web.

Teaching

The LETC provides teaching on information skills to students at the University of Leeds, especially to first year undergraduates in Joint Honours Arts and Social Sciences, who take the module ACOM1066. “ACOM” stands for “Arts Computing”, but the module has evolved over time from a primary focus on Information Technology towards a greater emphasis on discovery and appropriate use of information resources.