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In the last few years, Saint Louis University has generated some great tools and projects for research. At the least, I am willing to share T-PEN our tool for transcription of digital images and discuss/demo the Tradamus tool that is forthcoming (April 2014) that seeks to be a modular, but end-to-end solution for creating a digital edition.

Probably, I will also talk about vHMML, which is an online resource for learning coming out in Spring, and a few other projects I can’t commit to text, but cannot keep secret.

In a perfect conference, these demos will only serve to show what chasms are left in tool development as I seek to find the next great need and expand these tools into other fields.

Every project I have worked on has been in collaboration with at least two other institutions and began with a sturdy “This would be cool, if it were not impossible” conversation. I want to finish another one of those conversations, but I would be happy to start one.

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It would be really cool to have a program that would semi-automate the process of geocoding textual data within a document in preparation for GIS analysis.  Given the complexities of place names, such a program would require some user validation for each data item.  As far as I know, there is no free software that does this.  A really ambitious program would also be able to map the data and expose the strengths of relationships among places for any set of text documents.  My particular interest in such a tool would involve the use of oral history transcripts.  I realize this is a pie-in-the-sky proposal.