Credits

Textable was initially designed and implemented by LangTech Sàrl on behalf of the department of language and information sciences (SLI) at the University of Lausanne (UNIL).

The largest part of funding was initially provided by the Unil’s Teaching innovation fund (Fonds d’innovation pédagogique - FIP), and led to the release of Textable v1.0 in summer 2012.

Textable’s development has continued between 2012 and 2013, still carried on by LangTech Sàrl, while the program was being gradually integrated to courses taught at Unil’s department of SLI (where most of the tutorials that would later become the Textable’s Basics and Advanced Topics sections of this documentation have been created).

In automn 2013, Textable became a registered Orange Canvas add-on and was renamed to Orange Textable (v1.3). This promotion has made it possible to reach a much larger pool of users, as witnessed by a steadily increasing number of downloads.

In early 2014, Unil’s FIP has renewed its support to Orange Textable by granting a maintenance funding. This has made it possible for LangTech Sàrl to collaborate with the creators of Orange Canvas, University of Ljubljana’s Biolab for producing version v1.4 of Orange Textable.

In the meantime, UNIL’s Faculty of Arts has granted additional funding for translating Orange Textable’s User guide from French to English, then converting it into the electronic form you’re currently reading. UNIL’s SLI department has provided some financial support to the project in 2015, which made it possible to handle warnings and error messages in a more user-friendly fashion in Orange Textable v1.5.2.

In 2016, funding granted by several sources at UNIL (SLI department, Digital humanities and digital cultures Lab, Faculty of Arts, and Teaching and technology support network) has made it possible to port Orange Textable to Python 3, enable it to deal with very large datasets (with the help of Arcanite Solutions), as well as improve the ergonomy of its interface, its presence on the web and its documentation (together with Uservalue).

In 2018, a partnership with the National qualification programme (BNF) has made it possible to start updating Orange Textable’s documentation. This effort could finally be pursued and finished in 2023-2024, when a new subsidy from UNIL’s Faculty of Arts made it possible to hire three student assistants to work on the software’s documentation (Lliana Doudot and André da Gloria Santiago) and its performance and responsiveness (Antonin Schnyder). This collective effort has led to the release of version 3.2.0. The new responsiveness code was then further refactored by Johan Cuda as part of his MA project in Humanities computing at UNIL, leading to the release of version 3.2.1.

Besides LangTech Sàrl and Aris Xanthos who have been involved at about every step of Orange Textable’s conception, implementation, documentation, and so on, a special mention should be made to Benjamin Gay (specifications, conception and implementation), people at Biolab (in particular Blaž Zupan and Aleš Erjavec for conception and implementation work), Nadia Spang Bovey (project management), Corinne Morey (French to English translation of the user guide, preparation of the online version of the documentation, and creation of most cookbook recipes), Douglas Duhaime (case study design and write-up), and many students (and a growing number of scholars) notably at Unil for their indispensable feedback as users of Orange Textable.