What is Collex? The project’s About page describes it in part as follows:
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.
A detailed description of the project is available in "COLLEX: Semantic Collections & Exhibits for the Remixable Web."
You can see Collex in action at the NINES (a Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) project, which also uses IVANHOE ("a shared, online playspace for readers interested in exploring how acts of interpretation get made and reflecting on what those acts mean or might mean") and Juxta ("a cross-platform tool for collating and analyzing any kind or number of textual objects").
The About 9s page identifies key objectives of the NINES project as follows:
- It will create a robust framework to support the authority of digital scholarship and its relevance in tenure and other scholarly assessment procedures.
- It will help to establish a real, practical publishing alternative to the paper-based academic publishing system, which is in an accelerating state of crisis.
- It will address in a coordinated and practical way the question of how to sustain scholarly and educational projects that have been built in digital forms.
- It will establish a base for promoting new modes of criticism and scholarship promised by digital tools.
