Canadian trawl fishes for facts

Academics will soon be able to go through archival material as easily as surfing the internet thanks to a Canadian portal being developed.

A C$6.7 million (£2.96 million) project called the Text Analysis Portal for Research (Tapor) will allow humanities scholars not only to view the materials they are studying but to employ analytical tools. Six Canadian universities are lending their expertise in humanities computing to develop a project that will go beyond simply storing archival material on computer but will use the tools academics employ when breaking down and analysing texts.

Stefan Sinclair, a Tapor organiser and co-director of an MA in humanities computing at the University of Alberta, said most big archiving projects were tied to cultural preservation and had little for academics. "What's different in this is the emphasis on text analysis."

Details: http://huco.ualberta.ca/Tapor/