A Brief Introduction to a Humanities Data Grid

摘要

In order to collaborate more closely with two academic departments in the Humanities at Rutgers, the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH) wanted to set up a distributed computing system to access resources on multiple machines, locally at CETH and remotely at the Philosophy and Classics departments. We wanted the system to be transparent and intuitive for the users and we wanted all resources to be represented as names in a hierarchy across platforms providing a logical view of the complete collection. Other considerations were: elegance, simplicity and liberal licensing, we did not want some bloated proprietary grid solution that would tie us in to costly upgrades and support fees.