Getty Research Institute Releases Getty’s Scholars’ Workspace, an Open-Source Humanities Research Tool

From the Getty Research Institute:

Today the Getty Research Institute announced the release of the Getty Scholars’ Workspace, a free downloadable tool designed specifically for collaborative humanities research.
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The Getty Scholars’ Workspace is an online environment designed to support collaborative art-historical and humanities research, where research teams can examine digital surrogates, build bibliographies, translate and annotate texts, share and annotate images, and exchange ideas. With the Scholars’ Workspace, research and communication are consolidated into a single online location accessible from anywhere.

The Getty Scholars’ Workspace features the following collaborative research tools:

• Bibliography builder: to collaboratively manage citations online

• Comparison tool: to upload images and create comparisons on a digital “light table”

• Essay tool: for writing, editing, and annotating texts

• Forum: for recording and storing project-related correspondence in a centralized location

• Image tool: to upload, crop, and annotate images, and create image comparisons

• Manuscript presentation tool: to upload a manuscript or other archival document and record transcriptions and translations

• Timeline tool: for creating an illustrated list of relevant dates in chronological order

As I’ve emphasized before, the Getty is committed to making our resources freely available to all. We do so by providing images through our Open Content Program, making our scholarship available with online scholarly catalogs, digitizing our archives and library collections; connecting our extensive databases and library holdings through the Getty Research Portal; making our vast research datasets available as Linked Open Data; and now our new open-source software will make it possible for art historians and other humanities scholars to conduct research collaboratively online—sharing resources and ideas to advance the field.
We believe that open access and collaboration are the cornerstones of the future of art-historical research and that the promise of digital art history is increasingly found in the kind of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchange that Getty Scholars’ Workspace will no doubt facilitate. I look forward to seeing what my colleagues in the humanities do with this exciting new tool.
Getty Scholars’ Workspace is an online environment designed to support collaborative art-historical and humanities research, where research teams can examine digital surrogates, build bibliographies, translate and annotate texts, share and annotate images, and exchange ideas. With Getty Scholars’ Workspace, research and communication are consolidated into a single online location accessible from anywhere.
The project was led by Murtha Baca, Head of the GRI’s Digital Art History program, with support from the J. Paul Getty Trust Web Group, the GRI’s department of Information Systems, and the GRI’s Digital Art History team. The development and advancement of the Getty Scholars’ Workspace would not have been possible without the generous support of the Seaver Institute, which provided partnership grants to the GRI for this project in 2014 and 2015.
Getty Scholars’ Workspace can be used with digital content from any museum or archive. It does, however, require technological expertise and will work best for users who have technical support in their own institutions. An installation guide and user manual are downloadable from the Scholars’ Workspace webpage.

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Direct to Getty Scholars’ Workspace

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