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Introduction

Tekst is a collaborative, web-based research platform for aligning, displaying, linking, exploring, and enriching resources on natural language texts. It is developed within the scope of the VedaWeb 2.0 research project, where it constitutes the technical basis of the VedaWeb research platform.

Git Repository

You are looking for Tekst's Git repository? It's over here.

Work-in-progress

While the Tekst platform is already in its open beta phase, this manual is still very much work-in-progress. We'll try to complete it as soon as possible, but please bear with us if you encounter any incomplete information.

Use cases

Tekst is primarily meant as a platform software for philological research projects. The original intent for the development of Tekst was to create the technical basis for the online research platform VedaWeb, where numerous resources on multiple Old Indic Sanskrit texts can be browsed, compared and searched. These include text versions, translations, annotations, audio recordings of recitations and references to external sources, which are all aligned to the structure of their respective reference texts.

Therefore, the main use cases for Tekst are comparable research projects that either want to publish and showcase their research data, simply curate a set of established resources on certain reference texts, or even encourage the research community to participate and contribute to a central platform dedicated to provide relevant resources.

In the end, giving it a try on your local machine is relatively easy.

Features

This list is far from exhaustive, but includes some features that might be decisive in certain scenarios:

  • Manage multiple independent, potentially differently structured texts
  • Run it as a closed, internally curated publishing platform or as an open platform for a selected research community to encourage user contributions
  • Built-in user management with authentication and a combination of role-based and ownership-based authorization
  • Built-in i18n with an extensible set of languages (contributions are welcome!)
  • Encouraging user contributons and collaboration by enabling user to
    • submit quick correction notes
    • create versions of existing resources to compose and propose deviating data
    • create own resources, propose them for publication and have them reviewed by the community
  • Per-resource data export (full or range-based) as JSON or CSV
  • Dozens of specialized usability features, developed with real-world needs of humanities researchers in mind
  • Extensively typed and documented server API (via OpenAPI specification) and built-in interactive API documentation (via Swagger UI and/or ReDoc), all thanks to FastAPI
  • Customize logos, UI colors, fonts, on-screen keyboards, ...
  • Built-in user messaging system
  • Publish data from various multi-modal resources, aligned to the structure of their respective common reference text
    • Plain text
    • Rich text
    • Text annotations
    • Images
    • Audio
    • External references
    • Integration of external APIs
    • Arbitrary key-value metadata
  • ...

Caveats

Depending on your requirements, you might want to consider the following list of potential shortcomings:

  • SEO: The web client is a SPA that is rendered in the browser (no SSR). As a result, visibility to search engines is somewhat limited.
  • No built-in functionality for uploading and managing media files. If you want to integrate image- or audio-based resources, you will have to host the respective media files yourself and link to them from your resources.
  • ... (get in touch if you find anything that should be added to this list, we mean it!)