Collex is a set of tools designed to aid students and scholars working in networked archives and federated repositories of humanities materials: a sophisticated COLLections and EXhibits mechanism for the semantic web.
Collex allows users to collect, annotate, and tag online objects and to repurpose them in illustrated, interlinked essays or exhibits. It functions within any modern web browser without recourse to plugins or downloads and is fully networked as a server-side application. By saving information about user activity (the construction of annotated collections and exhibits) as “remixable” metadata, the Collex system writes current practice into the scholarly record and permits knowledge discovery based not only on the characteristics or “facets” of digital objects, but also on the contexts in which they are placed by a community of scholars.
Collex builds on semantic web technologies and brings folksonomy tagging to trusted, peer-reviewed scholarly archives. Collex is free, generalizable, and open source, and has been implemented by two interconnected scholarly sites: NINES and 18thConnect.
A Collex whitepaper is available in PDF format, and there have been several articles published about its development.
- Aurélia Chossegros, “Le Site à la loupe: NINES.“ l’Observatoire Critique, 5 April, 2007.
- Amy Earhart, Using NINES Collex in the Classroom (Prof. Hacker, The Chronicle, 2010)
- Dana Wheeles, “Testing NINES,” Literary & Linguistic Computing Volume 25, Issue 4 (December 2010): 393-403.
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