TextGrid is a research group with the goal of supporting access to and the exchange of information in the humanities and social sciences with the help of modern information technology (the grid).
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TextGrid is a group project with ten partners and will be supported for the period of three years by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in Germany. After the first project phase (February 2006-May 2009), in which TextGrid carried out developmental work and developed the infrastructure for a virtual research environment (VRE), the second project phase will convert the TextGrid VRE into a sustainable organization and make it available to a broad user community.
Since 2006, TextGrid has been developing an internet-based platform that offers researchers tools and services for the analysis of text-based data in various digital archives – independent of format, software configuration or location. Researchers in the humanities and social sciences will then be able to use a distributed, secure, flexible, and expandable research environment, with shared tools, data, and methods for collaborative purposes.
The infrastructure consists of two components:
TextGrid is one of five academic community projects that have been developing a sustainable grid infrastructure in Germany since September 2005 in the framework of the D-Grid integration project. The purpose of this project is to make information and knowledge technologies useful for researchers working in the humanities. In March 2009, these five community projects combined to form the research group “WissGrid—Grid for Research.” This plan comes after the development of blueprints and concepts for building new community grids as well as for the application of knowledge and experience that has been previously attained. During the duration of the project, TextGrid plans to implement a community-specific legal form for integration in the D-Grid organizational model.