The following post is by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Jonathan Gray and is cross-posted from his personal blog.
A little while ago I posted some ideas for a project called OpenPhilosophy.org, which would enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create collections of philosophical texts which have entered the public domain.
As was announced last week on this blog, the project has secured some funding from JISC, who champion digital technology for use in higher education in the UK. The project will be a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, the University of Oxford and the Open Knowledge Foundation. It will also involve students and staff at other institutions in the UK and further afield.
The project will develop an open source platform called TEXTUS, which will enable users to create, manage and interact with collections of texts. TEXTUS will power OpenPhilosophy.org. The platform will be developed with input from students and staff who will be using OpenPhilosophy.org in their teaching and research. It will have a strong emphasis on creating something beautiful, simple, intuitive and user-centric.
It will benefit from the wisdom of a distinguished Advisory Board of philosophy professors and digital humanities experts, which currently includes:
- Frederick Beiser, Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University
- Tobias Blanke, Head of the Centre for e-Research at King’s College London
- David Bourget, Director of the Centre for Computing in Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London
- Andrew Bowie, Professor of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway, University of London
- Dan Cohen, Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University
- Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at New School for Social Research, New York and Editor of The Stone philosophy forum at the New York Times
- Manuel Dries, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oxford
- Christian J. Emden, Associate Professor in German Studies at Rice University
- Stefan Gradmann, Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
- Kenneth Haynes, Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics, Brown University
- Derek Matravers, Professor in Philosophy at the Open University and Lecturer at the University of Cambridge.
- Nigel Warburton, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University and Co-founder of the Philosophy Bites podcast
In the first phase of the project we will be developing a prototype of the TEXTUS platform, and sourcing and selecting public domain philosophical texts to include in OpenPhilosophy.org.
If you’d like to be kept in the loop on the development of OpenPhilosophy.org, you can request an invite to test the project when it is ready. If you’d like to come and help out, you are warmly invited to join us on the public open-philosophy discussion list. You can also follow @OpenPhilosophy on Twitter.
Pictures of Roman Ondák’s “Table” (Berlin, 2010) by Marc Wathieu, CC-BY.
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
