I’m a humanities researcher invested in using DevonAgent to mine online archives. I’m finding that the prepared plugins aren’t easily adaptable to the search engines I need to use.
A quick list of where I’d like to use DevonAgent:
- flickr Commons
- Europeana.org
- Google Book Search
- ECCO / EEBO / Making of the Modern World
- Hansard’s Parliamentary Papers
- Parliamentary Debates
- Palmer’s Index to the Times
- Nineteenth Century Newspaper File
The idea would be to start with one or two and add the rest.
The potential usership of such a “scholarly search package” is pretty big – this is the future of historical research on the web, and I’ll be using teaching graduates and undergraduates the tools as soon as they’re available.
I’d like to field a quick set of questions about who might be interested:
Does anyone else on these boards have an interest in seeing this happen?
Is DevonTechnologies itself interested in designing these plugins to extend DevonAgent’s interface with the deep web?
Are there any Devon users who would be interested in helping me by writing plugins, possibly for pay?