Events Calendar
Miguel Garci-Gomez, Duke University
CiberTextos Interactivos: A Seminar on Making and Using Textual Databases with Search Capability for Teaching and Research
Abstract:
This seminar, sponsored by the Dept. of Romance Studies and the Program in Medieval & Renaissance Studies, honors Professor Miguel Garci-Gomez's retirement, but Prof. Garci-Gomez wishes to give more than receive. He will present CiberTextos Interactivos, his database technology that enables any user, in an open-access format, to create textual databases with search capability for personal uses in teaching and research. For an advance look at the database, see http://mgarci.aas.duke.edu/cibertextos/.

Come to the seminar and learn how to enter your favorite text(s) into the database and be able within a few minutes to search with various sophisticated terms. CiberTextos already contains a large collection of electronic editions of texts in Spanish, English, French, Italian, and Latin. For a review of CiberTextos by Intute, see http://www.intute.ac.uk/cgi-bin/fullrecord.pl?handle=20090525-1602049#user. Intute is a free online service providing access to the very best web resources for education and research. All material is evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists to create the Intute database. Arts and Humanities sites reviews are led by the University of Oxford in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University. Inut has given CiberTextos its highest rating. In some months, CiberTextos has received up to 43,065 Unique Visitors and 347,350 Hits.

Using CiberTextos, libraries, for example, could make texts in their collections easily and thoroughly accessible to users, showing them a highway from words to ideas, and from ideas to words. An instructor of language and literature, for example, could process in a few minutes a text to be used by students in a class, thus making it more accessible and searchable, and then assign students specific topics of research.

Being multilingual and based on technology applications for text analysis, CiberTextos can bring together a multitude of new and unique collaborations among students and scholars from different fields in need of tools for integrating communication, information, and media technologies.

Come learn how to make use of CiberTextos in your class or in your research. And enjoy a reception in honor of Miguel!

Friday, September 25, 2009, 5:00pm
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Romance Studies Seminar