The Medieval Plant Survey (http://medieval-plants.org) is a web portal for interdisciplinary and international research of medieval plants and their lore. The WordPress based online software utilized by this site is designed to meet the need for content creation and storage while addressing the current situation of decentralised research. In this presentation we will outline how we setup data management as well as inter-scholarly networking and communication.

The website’s main features are its plant name indices, the text archive, and the research database. The indices include historical and contemporary plant names in six different languages, which are all interlinked based on their meaning. The text archive consists of primary texts as well as research literature, and a comprehensive bibliographic database through which this part of the data is connected. The research database hosts all metadata as well as semantic relations (e.g. the interconnection of primary and secondary texts with different plant names), it also stores comments, research findings, and author and versioning information.

Historical texts form the center of our research as they are our most important link to the past. To provide maximum interoperability, all of our data is available in appropriate markup formats. This is why our software integrates via the TextGrid-Middleware to the Textgrid Network (http://textgrid.de), the features of which we use to apply adequate xml tagging.

Networking and user-interaction is handled by the WordPress software and suitable plug-ins, which offer sufficient features to support user interaction in the scientific field, which to date has been minimal. The most requested feature is that all user-to-data interaction (text and metadata input and correction as well as commenting) is accounted for by user name. Discussions happen in the comments section of the entries. To encourage increased scholarly interaction and to provide science-to-public information flow, all data is available on an open access basis.
Bibliography:

• Emigh, William; Herring,Susan C.: Collaborative Authoring on the Web: A Genre Analysis of Online Encyclopedias. In: Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. URL http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1385436. – Aktualisierungsdatum : 24.01.2005.
• Klug, Helmut W.; Weinberger, Roman: Modding Medievalists – Taking Medieval Studies into Web 2.0 and beyond: Designing a web based portal for the Medieval Plant Survey / Portal der Pflanzen des Mittelalters (MPS / PPM). In: Van Arsdall, Anne (Ed.); Graham, Timothy (Ed.): Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West: Essays in Honor of John M. Riddle. Aldershot: Ashgate 2012, p. 328-358. (Medicine in the Medieval Mediterranean).
• Leubsdorf, Carl: Annotum: An open-source authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress. In: Proceedings of the Journal Article Tag Suite Conference 2011 [Internet]. Bethesda (MD): National Center for Biotechnology Information (US) : 2011 URL http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK63828/.
• O’Reilly, Tim: What is Web 2.0. URL http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/ 2005/09/30/ what-is-web-20.html. – Aktualisierungsdatum: 30.09.2005.
• Sorensen, Korsgaard: Networked elearning and collaborative knowledge building: Design and facilitation. In: Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, (2005), Nr. 4/4, URL http://www.citejournal.org/articles/v4i4general3.pdf

Poster: Helmut W. Klug: Poster – Portal der Pflanzen des Mittelalters

Screencast Part 1:

Screencast Part 2:

Publisher’s blurb which also has a detailed list of the contents: Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Filaha Texts Project and website at http://www.filaha.org which focuses on medieval Arabic farming manuals and their manuscripts. The FTP should be of interest to those engaged in Arabic and Islamic Studies, Historical Geography, Environmental History, Medieval History, Agricultural History and Traditional Knowledge.
The FTP sets out to publicise the latest research on the Arabic Books of Filaha, providing bio-bibliographic profiles on each of the authors, including notices of all existing manuscripts, published editions, etc. Also provided are a number of Arabic texts and English translations, as well as various scholarly resources (bibliography, glossaries, articles, etc). At the heart of the Project lies a collaborative translation platform that allows a text to be translated by multiple translators at the same time. Ultimately, we hope to be able to publish facsimiles of the manuscripts themselves and full English translations. We encourage all those interested to register as members of the FT Network (see Community page) allowing them to participate in the Forum and Translation Platform. The FTP is conceived as a collaborative project. Any corrections/suggestions and contributions in terms of articles, images, content, etc. will be most welcome.

This project is in many ways interesting for our project but especially because it makes available Arabic medieval texts  which are perfectly suited to add to our own research but also because of its community based research approach, which is something the MPS also wants to build on. We will follow the growth of this project with excitement!