Juxta, for comparing and collating multiple witnesses

Jerome McGann announces ARP’s Juxta
Our development group ARP (Applied Research in Patacriticism:
www.patacriticism.org) is today releasing the 1.0 version of Juxta.
Anyone interested in online critical editing, whether theoretically or
practically or both, will probably want to look at the tool and perhaps
try it out.
Juxta is an open source cross platform tool for comparing and collating
multiple witnesses of a single textual work. The tool allows one to set
any of the witnesses as the base text, to add or remove witness texts,
to switch the base text at will, and to annotate the comparisons and
save the results.
Juxta comes with several kinds of analytic visualizations. The basic
collation gives a split frame comparison of a base text and a witness
text along with a display of the digital images from which the base text
is derived. Juxta provides a heat map of all textual variants and
allows the user to locate at the level of any textual unit all witness
variations from the base text. A histogram of the collations is
particularly useful for long documents. It displays the density of all
variation from the base text and serves as a useful finding aid for
specific variants. Juxta can also output a lemmatized schedule in html
of the textual variants in any set of comparisons.
This release of the tool comes with demonstration examples from Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Shakespeare, and Walter Pater.
We’ve set up a blog for commentary and exchange:
http://www.patacriticism.org/juxta/
We’re keen to support a user community around the software and to hear
from you about both its successes and deficiencies. You can download
the installer from the following site:
http://www.patacriticism.org/juxta/download/
You may want to consult the following help page, which includes a link
to our user manual:
http://www.patacriticism.org/juxta/help/
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns. You can write
to me or, even better, to the following: tecnologies@nines.org
Jerome McGann