intro: >-
  A corpus of ancient texts and (linguistic) annotations represents a large body
  of knowledge. Text-Fabric makes that knowledge accessible to programmers and
  non-programmers.
properties:
  development:
    - link: https://dans.knaw.nl/en/
      title: DANS
    - link: https://di.huc.knaw.nl
      title: KNAW Humanities Cluster - Digital Infrastructure
  languages:
    - English
  link: https://annotation.github.io/text-fabric/tf/index.html
  mediaTypes:
    - 'text '
  problemContact:
    - link: https://pure.knaw.nl/portal/nl/persons/dirk-roorda
      title: Dr. Dirk Roorda
  programmingLanguages:
    - link: https://www.python.org
      title: Python 3.6
  researchActivities:
    - '1'
    - '5.1'
    - 2.4.1
    - 1.1.4
    - '6'
    - 2.1.4
    - 1.1.7
  resourceTypes:
    - Software
  standards:
    - link: https://pypi.org/project/text-fabric/
      title: 'Text-Fabric '
  status:
    - Active
relatedProjects:
  - 'BHSA: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia Amstelodamensis'
relatedResources:
  - This resource is not (yet) available
slug: text-fabric
tabs:
  learn:
    body: |
      ## Learn
  mentions:
    body: |+
      ## Publications

  overview:
    body: >
      ## Overview

      Text-Fabric is machinery for processing such corpora as annotated graphs.
      It treats corpora and annotations as data, much like big tables, but
      without loosing the rich structure of text, such as embedding and multiple
      representations. It deals with text in a state where all markup is gone,
      but where the complete logical structure still sits in the data.

      Whether a corpus comes from plain texts, OCR output, databases, XML, TEI:
      Text-Fabric has support to convert it to single column files, where each
      file corresponds with a feature of the text.

      The Python library `tf` can be used to collect a bunch of features and
      display it as an annotated text. What ties the features together are
      natural numbers, that serve to anchor the elementary positions in the text
      as well as the relevant structures within the text.

      When Text-Fabric loads a dataset of features, you can instruct it to get
      the features from anywhere. That means it supports workflows where
      annotations are produced by third parties and can be used against the
      original corpus, without additional work. It also facilitates mappings
      between ongoing versions of the corpus, so that annotations made on older
      versions can be ported to newer versions without redoing the annotation
      creation.
    bodyMore: |+
      ### Provenance

      The foundational ideas derive from work done in and around the
      [ETCBC](http://etcbc.nl) avant-la-lettre from 1970 onwards
      by Eep Talstra, Crist-Jan Doedens,
      ([Ph.D. thesis](https://books.google.nl/books?id=9ggOBRz1dO4C)),
      Henk Harmsen, Ulrik Sandborg-Petersen ([Emdros](https://emdros.org)),
      and many others.

      Dirk Roorda entered in that world in 2007 as a 
      [DANS](https://dans.knaw.nl/en)
      employee, doing a joint small data project,
      and a bigger project SHEBANQ in 2013/2014.
      In 2013 he developed
      [LAF-Fabric](https://github.com/dirkroorda/laf-fabric)
      as a tool for constructing the website
      [SHEBANQ](https://shebanq.ancient-data.org).

      LAF-Fabric is based on the ISO standard
      [Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF)](https://www.iso.org/standard/37326.html).
      LAF is an attempt to marry graph models to the 
      [Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)](http://www.tei-c.org) which lives in XML.
      It is a good try, but it turns out that using XML technology for
      graphs is a pain. All the usual advantages of using the XML toolchain evaporate.

      So he decided to leave XML and its associated syntactical complexity.
      Everything that makes LAF-Fabric complicated was taken out,
      as well as all things that are not essential for the sake of raw data processing.
      That became Text-Fabric version 1 at the end of 2016.

      It turned out that this move has freed the way to work towards higher-level goals:

      * a new search engine (inspired by [MQL](https://emdros.org) and
      * support for research data workflows.

      Text-Fabric is an attempt to provide digital humanists with corpus research
      functions based on technology that is easily accessible.

      Hence, the implementation of Text-Fabric-search has been done from the ground up,
      and uses a strategy that is very different from Ulrik's MQL search engine.

      Work on Text-Fabric was continued at DANS till 2022and later
      at [KNAW/Humanities Cluster](https://huc.knaw.nl).
      
      Recent work consists of making it work with GitLab, and importing the
      [General Missives](https://github.com/CLARIAH/wp6-missieven)
      into it, a volume of the
      [Daghregisters](https://github.com/CLARIAH/wp6-daghregisters),
      and a few
      [works of W.F. Hermans](https://gitlab.huc.knaw.nl/hermans/works)
      (not publicly accessible).

title: Text-Fabric