From Coding to Curating: A Decade of Building Tools for Close Reading of Digitized Texts

Over the last decade, the Lexomics Research Group has leveraged interdisciplinary teaching and research to build a series of tools to help scholars explore digitized texts. What began as a very focused scholarly question about an Old English text has led to an innovative research group with undergraduates, sets of “connected” courses, and Lexos: a simple, web-based workflow for text processing, statistical analysis, and visualization designed to address barriers of entry to computer-assisted explorations of texts. Yet, as more scholars and students across the academy engage in computational explorations of texts, we submit that a more intentional curation of digital assets for scholars is increasingly needed. Our evolution brings us (back) to the library seeking expertise with ways of storing digitized texts in various states (e.g., raw, cleaned, and/or segmented), caching preliminary, negative, and final tries, and how best to support the dissemination and reproducibility of results