Juxta

Juxta is an open-source tool for comparing and collating multiple witnesses to a single textual work. The software allows users to set any of the witnesses as the base text, to add or remove witness texts, to switch the base text at will, and to annotate Juxta-revealed comparisons and save the results.

Juxta also comes with several kinds of analytic visualizations (which are quite attractive and useful, by the way). The primary collation gives a split frame comparison of a base text with a witness text, along with a display of the digital images from which the base text is derived. Juxta displays a heat map of all textual variants and allows the user to locate — at the level of any textual unit — all witness variations from the base text. A histogram of Juxta collations is particularly useful for long documents. This visualization displays the density of all variation from the base text and serves as a useful finding aid for specific variants. Juxta can also output a lemmatized schedule (in HTML format) of the textual variants in any set of comparisons.

Juxta is built by Applied Research in Patacriticism, a software development research team located at the University of Virginia and funded through an award to professor Jerome McGann from the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

Version 1.0 of Juxta was released on February 6th, 2006.

Mac, Windows, or Unix versions of the program can be downloaded at the Juxta site.

Though built for collating modern English texts, Juxta is ready to use for collating variants of a Latin text (experto credite). Collating a Greek text should be also possible.