Dirk Roorda

Personal profile

About

Text and annotations

No text stands on its own. No matter how long a text, there always seems to be more information around and about it than in it.

In order to understand a text and to grasp the role it has played over the centuries, scholars annotate them.

In doing so, they have woven a web of interpretation and understanding around texts.

This activity continues until today, and the digital age has produced an explosion of fabrics of texts and their annotations.

Scholarship and programming

Programming is no longer an ultra-technical, nerdy, numerical activity. Computation has become narrative, expressive, visual, intuitive.

The Python programming language goes a long way to make reading and writing the instructions for a computer a pleasant experience.

The Jupyter Notebook, born in the Python world, has turned programming into true story telling.

And such stories can be published in data journals, such as the Research Data Journal.

Annotation as an ongoing project

I am Dirk Roorda, since 2007 employee of DANS, the Netherlands Research Data Archive, and my goal is to bridge the remaining gap between researchers of texts and the world of computing.

To that end I have developed Text-Fabric, a tool that helps you research your family of texts. Together with specialized scholars, I have used it for the Hebrew Bible, the Quran, and various sets of cuneiform tablets.

My work rests on the shoulders of numerous scholars and computer scientists. My own addition lies in providing the easiest routes from your source materials to your analytical workflows.

In the meanwhile, every line of code I produce, is open source, published on Github, and archived in various long-term archives. The results you obtain with my tools can easily be published and remain accessible for a long, long time. Out of respect for the texts.

My work resides on Github under the organization with the name annotation.

Contact

There are several ways of getting into touch, all by clicking a link below.

If you want to use Text-Fabric, or want to contribute corpora or exchange ideas: welcome to our ancient-data workspace on Slack. You'll meet other people that are (deeply) involved in corpus research, and you can chat in several channels.

If you have a casual or non-technical question: email me.

If you find bugs in Text-Fabric, or want new features, file an issue on GitHub.

Join ancient-data on Slack email me file an issue on GitHub

Education/Academic qualification

Logic and Foundation of Mathematics, Ph.D., University of Amsterdam

01 Aug 1987 → 01 Sep 1991

Award Date: 20 Sep 1991

Mathematics and Computer Science, M.Sc., Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

01 Sep 1980 → 30 Jun 1987

Award Date: 30 Jun 1987

Keywords

BC Logic
BL Religion
DE The Mediterranean Region. The Greco-Roman World
D051 Ancient History
P Philology. Linguistics
PI Oriental languages and literatures
PJ Semitic
ZA4050 Electronic information resources
ZA4450 Databases
Z665 Library Science. Information Science

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Research Output

11 Article
6 Software
3 Chapter
3 Contribution to conference proceedings
3 More
- 2 Website
- 1 PhD thesis

On Open Access to Research Data: Experiences and reflections from DANS

Kraaikamp, E., Grootveld, M. J., Roorda, D. & Hollander, H. S., Feb 2019, In : Grey Literature Conference Proceedings. GL20, 20, p. 40-49

Research output: Contribution to journal/periodical › Article › Scientific › peer-review

Open Access

Text-fabric: handling Biblical data with IKEA logistics

Roorda, D., 20 Nov 2019, In : HIPHIL Novum Journal for Bible and Digital Resources. 5, 2, p. 126-135 10 p.

Research output: Contribution to journal/periodical › Article › Scientific › peer-review

Open Access

File

3 Downloads (Pure)

Visual Analytics of the DARIAH in-kind contributions

Scharnhorst, A. M., Admiraal, F. & Roorda, D., 2019, DARIAH Annual Event 2019: Humanties data: Book of abstracts. Edmond, J. & Admiraal, F. (eds.). Berlin: DARIAH, p. 125-126

Research output: Chapter in book/volume › Chapter › Scientific › peer-review

Open Access

File