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What is THREAD?

THREAD stands for Toolkit for Humanities Research and Editing of Ancient Documents. This is a collaborative project which brings together interested scholars, designers, and programmers to promote the development of free, reusable, interoperable tools for digital work on ancient texts.

The name THREAD is intended to evoke both connectedness (with texts as woven fabrics and these tools sewing them together), and sequence (with a unified workflow stringing one stage to the next). Although many tools already exist to produce and publish digital editions of texts and mark them up so they can be used as the basis for further research, often the scholars seeking to produce these digital texts are unaware of the tools that are available. Furthermore, such tools tend to be difficult to use together because they were developed for a specific project and therefore lack the flexibility or generality to be used for other texts. The result is that we work in isolated “silos,” wastefully using our limited resources to repeat much work that has already been done.

We are convinced that work on ancient texts can advance much more productively if we work together to develop and share tools that are flexible and reusable, tools that work together easily across different projects and corpora. Therefore our objective is to help produce a unified toolset for a comprehensive workflow appropriate for ancient texts. This involves four tasks:

1. unifying the existing landscape of text providers with a standard API for textual repositories,
2. unifying the existing tools by adapting them to communicate with one another using that API,
3. designing and writing new API-compliant tools for those stages of a common workflow that are not yet well supported, and
4. publicizing the tools across the spectrum of humanities disciplines that process ancient texts.

The net result should be that all of us are able to do more work more easily on the ancient texts we find so fascinating.