Our web application nopaque combines coordinated tools such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natrual Language Processing (NLP) and a powerful Keyword In Context Search (KWIC) with the CQP query language.
nopaque offers the possibility to use all tools individually or as a workflow. All work steps are coordinated in such a way that individual services can be used on top of each other. The platform supports researchers in converting their files into formats that can be further processed, automatically enriching them with information and then analyzing them, so that nopaque maps a large part of the research processes in the humanities. With this toolbox we address researchers in the humanities from all disciplines and levels of knowledge. The data generated during the processes can be downloaded after each step in order to evaluate or further process them with other (external) tools.
nopaque is developed by a small, interdisciplinary Team at University Bielefeld called Data Infrastructure and Digital Humanities (INF). We are part of the SFB 1288 - Practices of comparing. Ordering and changing the world.
For mor information visit the SFB1288 web site or our team page.
Yes nopaque is free to use for everyone! It does not matter if you are a researcher in the humanities, a student or just someone who wants to learn something new. Just sign up for it and try it out!
When we started developing nopaque we wanted to have a cool name like voyant which can be translated to light or seeing. So we choose opaque thinking that it means that something is transparent. After a while we realized that we misunderstood the meaning of the word (opaque means non-transparent) and simply negated it ending up with nopaque.
We also think nopaque fits pretty nicley because we want you to be able to make your texts transparent and see through them with our analysis tool to gain knew knowledge about them.
nopaques frontend (what the user sees) is written in HTML 5 and Javascript. The backend (stuff that happens on our servers) is realized with Flask, a python based lightweight WSGI web application framework. We utilize Docker to easily deploy nopaque on our servers.
The client server real time comminication is implemented using Flask-SocketIO.
Every service (e.g. OCR or NLP) provided by nopaque is using established opensource software. Take a look at their related questions to learn more about them.
For more details take a look at the source code.
The File Setup service uses ImageMagick to merge your images into one file.
For more details take a look at the source code.
The OCR service uses Tesseract OCR.
For more details take a look at the source code.
The NLP service uses spaCy.
For more details take a look at the source code.
The Corpus Analysis service uses the IMS Open Corpus Workbench (CWB). We developed a Python library for the IMS Open Corpus Workbench (CWB) corpus query interface (CQi) API to be able to request query results from the CWB server using simple Python code. The library is avilable on PyPi.
For more details take a look at the source code.
Yes. You can download everything that is the result of a service and save it somwhere else. You can download your results depending on the service in easily reusable formats like TXT, PDF, JSON, XML and many more. This also empowers you to use your results in other third party software to continue you research beyond the capabiltiys of nopaque.
Your uploaded research data cannot be accessed by any third party. Take a look at our GDPR statement and terms of use if you want to learn more about how we handle your data.
nopaque saves your research data in theory as long as your account exists. But nopaque is not a cloud storage solution! We encourage you to permanently save your data somwhere else.
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. OCR is the automatical conversion of images of handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.
NLP stands for natural language processing wich is a subfield of linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language. For example nopaque uses spaCy to automtically tag every word with its part of speech tag which describes its grammatical property.