The Digital Tolkien Project consists of a wide range of sub-projects at varying levels of activity and progress.

At the highest level, these can be divided into:

  • Data Projects involving text preparation, structural markup and citation systems, annotation, and analysis
  • Websites and other outputs for navigating, searching, querying and visualizing information
  • Software Tools for facilitating all of the above

Underpinning much of this is the Tolkien Linked Open Data project which aims to achieve greater connectivity between sub-projects and greater accessibility to data to facilitate collaboration.

Data Projects for Tolkien’s Mythopoeic Works

Bibliographic Modelling

Bibliographic information and metadata and the relationship between editions, impressions, and variants of text.

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Further expanding our data model and filling it out with edition and impression information.

Text Preparation

We distinguish between published works consisting entirely of narrative (e.g. The Lord of the Rings) from those that combine fragments with commentary (e.g. Unfinished Tales or The History of Middle-earth). In the latter case, we both model the published work as a whole and extract individual texts which can then be treated separately (e.g. Quenta Noldorinwa).

Texts are marked up structurally and in the case of commented works prior to extraction, this structure distinguishes the source texts from the notes and commentary. This structural markup then forms the basis for a citation system.

Once a citation system exists, the text can be made available on Search Tolkien and Cite Tolkien (see below).

Older Blog Posts

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Currently working on text preparation of The History of Middle-earth and The Great Tales.

Text Annotation and Analysis

Once a text is prepared various annotations and analyses can be performed including:

  • word extraction for glossary
  • direct speech markup and speaker identification
  • name index and name mapping
  • linguistic analysis (postagging, etc)
  • alignment with other versions
  • scene segmentation
  • characters and locations
  • dates and times
  • narrative features

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Speaker identification has been completed for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Currently working on name mapping, characters, locations, and scene segmentation for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Progress has been made on aligning drafts and multiple editions of The Hobbit. Currently working on aligning various versions of the Túrin story.

As more texts are prepared, words will be extracted for the glossary and other annotation tasks will be performed.

Glossary / Word-level Data

Phonological, etymological, grammatical, and semantic information about individual words in the texts. Published on the Tolkien Glossary site.

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Tagging various semantic domains; expanding coverage to other texts; adding pronunciation, etymology, and part-of-speech; distinguishing speakers and, in the case of commented works, other authors.

Timeline Data

Extraction of events, dates, and times from both explicit chronologies and annals as well as narrative text.

Status and Plans

Eventually support filtering and visualizing on the Timelines website.

Location Data / Maps

Extraction of place names and location information from texts and maps as well as the development of authority lists.

Status and Plans

Currently annotating locations at the paragraph level in The Lord of the Rings and mapping place names to places in The Silmarillion.

Older Blog Posts

Relevant Videos and Clips

Character Data / Genealogy

Extraction of character names and relationships from texts and paratextual material as well as the development of authority lists.

Status and Plans

Status and Plans

Currently annotating characters at the paragraph level in The Lord of the Rings and mapping character names to characters in The Silmarillion.

Poetry Data

Chronology, analysis, and citation of Tolkien’s poetry. Published on the Tolkien Poetry website.

Status and Plans

Improving metadata and chronological information, metrical and rhyme analysis.

Audiobook Data

Linking timecodes and passage citations.

Status and Plans

Initial transcriptions of audio files to align with text.

Other Data Projects

Tolkien’s Life

Chronology, letters, biography, archival records

See Tolkien’s Life on the Tolkien Linked Open Data Project site.

Status and Plans

Annotating the Scull and Hammond Chronology and Carpenter’s Biography.

Secondary Material / Scholarship

Art, music, blogs, podcasts, articles, and monographs

See Linking Secondary Material on the Tolkien Linked Open Data Project site.

Status and Plans

Gathering initial material to link to.

Websites

Main Website

https://digitaltolkien.com/

Search Tolkien

Search across works, see the distribution of terms and phrases, look up the citation reference for passages.

https://search.digitaltolkien.com/

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Adding more texts, supporting searching of multiple terms, visualization of results, filtering on speech, etc.

Cite Tolkien

Look up a citation reference, make citation references linkable, and navigate the structure of texts.

https://cite.digitaltolkien.com/
https://cite-draft.digitaltolkien.com/

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Adding more texts. Drafts of new citations systems are shown on the DRAFT Cite Tolkien site.

Tolkien Glossary

Presenting word-level information (see above).

https://glossary.digitaltolkien.com/

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

New ways of visualizing and searching the data.

Tolkien Poetry

Search, navigate, and visualize information about Tolkien’s poetry (see above).

https://poetry.digitaltolkien.com/

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Full text search and visualization of analysis.

Tolkien Timelines

Upcoming site that will enable visualization and filtering of events on a timeline.

https://timelines.digitaltolkien.com/

Status and Plans

Once the Linked Open Data project has annotated event data, we can start to show it here.

Little Delvings

Standalone visualizations based on the text and annotations of the Digital Tolkien Project.

https://delvings.digitaltolkien.com/

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Continue to expand the capabilities of Belladonna, come up with new ideas of things to visualize from existing data, highlight new analyses coming from ongoing annotation work.

ROP Data site

Search and visualizations of characters, locations, scenes, and dialogue in Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power.

https://rop.digitaltolkien.com/

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Finish S2E8 ingestion. Potentially add more features. Generalize to other adaptations.

LOD Project site

Informational site about the Tolkien Linked Open Data Project.

https://lod.digitaltolkien.com/

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

As the LOD project develops, we will continue to document guidelines and progress on this site.

Software Tools

Belladonna

A Python tool for making beautiful infographics to post to social media. Primarily used for Little Delvings.

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Continuing to add more recipes, clean up the code, and eventually open source.

Rimbë

A web application for crowd-sourced text annotation. We are currently using this for annotating characters, locations, scenes, and narrative features in The Lord of the Rings.

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Continuing to develop features to support the annotation team. May eventually open source.

Arda

An open-source Python library for Tolkien-related data processing. It currently includes some code for Middle-earth calendrical calculations and Elvish syllabification.

http://github.com/digitaltolkien/arda

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Continue to improve both the calendrical and linguistic code.

Various Alignment Tools

Various ad-hoc tools built to assist in the alignment of different versions of texts.

Relevant Videos and Clips

Status and Plans

Consolidate and build into a more generally usable tool for others.

Documentary Transcript Viewer

An experimental tool for viewing videos with timestamped transcriptions. Originally built as part of a project to annotate Tolkien-related documentaries.

Relevant Videos and Clips

Reading Environments

One of our long term goals is to develop an online reading environment to view texts and annotations.