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What is Tekst?

Warning

🏗 Just like Tekst itself, this manual/documentation is still very incomplete and "work in progress".

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

Info

At the moment, the VedaWeb platform is still a custom made application that was developed in an earlier phase of the VedaWeb project. Many of its concepts will find their way into Tekst, but it lacks core features like user management, collaboration and the possibility to work with multiple arbitrarily structured texts. As soon as Tekst is ready, the VedaWeb platform will become the first public instance of Tekst.

Use cases

Philological research projects

The main intent for the development of Tekst was to create a 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 and references to external sources, which are all aligned to the structure of their respective reference texts.

Therefore, the most obvious use case 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.

Alternative use cases

The above being said, nothing is stopping you from using Tekst in different contexts. As long as

  1. your data revolves around a somewhat structured work or other phenomenon (e.g. book, movie, theatre play or even a simple sequence of years) with one or more structure levels
  2. the types of resources Tekst offers match the data you want to work with

..., Tekst might be a viable option. In the end, giving it a try on your local machine is relatively easy.

Please note

Despite the alternative use cases mentioned, "texts" are used exemplary throughout this documentation and in the internal user interface of Tekst, as this is the main use case for this software.

Features

This list is far from exhaustive, but includes some features that might be decisive for certain use cases:

  • Manage multiple independent, potentially differently structured texts and arbitrary related resources in a single platform instance
  • One common user base for the whole platform
  • UI colors will adapt to the currently selected working text for visual unambiguity
  • Built-in i18n with an extensible set of languages
  • Integrated user management with authentication and role-based as well as owner-based authorization
  • Closed Mode to run the platform purely administrator-driven, turning off registration for arbitrary users
  • Customization of
    • Content fonts
    • On-screen keyboard character sets
  • 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

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 (so no SSR). As a result, visibility to search engines is somewhat limited.
  • UI responsiveness: The user interface – especially the public-facing part – is responsive to the use on hand-held mobile devices. That being said, it was primarily developed for desktop-based usage. This might show in places.