RLetters

Homepage: http://charlespence.net/rletters
Git: http://github.com/cpence/rletters
Author: Charles Pence
Contributors: See Contributors section below
Copyright: 2011–2013
License: MIT License
Latest Version: (still in private beta)
Release Date: (still in private beta)

RLetters is an application designed to let users perform complex searches as well as digital-humanities and text-mining analysis tasks on a corpus of journal articles.

Features

Complex search

The Solr backend on which RLetters is based allows for a number of complicated searching operations:

Boolean operators (“darwin OR huxley”)
Wildcard search (”fish” or “wom?n”)
Text stemming (“evolution” matching “evolutionary” or “evolutionist”)
Fuzzy matching (matching words similar to the requested term)
Proximity searching (two terms within N words of one another)

Text analysis

RLetters allows users to save the results of a given search as a “dataset.” This produces a saved record that users can return to later in order to perform text analysis tasks.

While text analysis tasks are a current area of active development in RLetters, currently the following are available:

Graph dataset by year
Export dataset as citations in a variety of formats
Show complete table of term frequency information (for datasets consisting of a single document)

Support for web and library standards

RLetters provides support for the following web and library standards:

unAPI for automatic bibliographic data retrieval from individual documents
WorldCat OpenURL Registry for detection of the OpenURL resolver of the user’s local library

And you can export bibliographic data in the following standard formats:

Cutting-edge development and maintenance tools

RLetters doesn’t leave your developers out in the cold, either. We’ve got support for the following features that make development, deployment, maintenance, and monitoring easier:

All deployment (and even much of the configuration) handled automatically by Capistrano
Track page views with Google Analytics
Source well-documented using Yard
Continuous integration support with Travis
Baked-in support for error reporting using Airbrake (account registration required)

Installation / Deployment

See our detailed installation and deployment guide for instructions. For the extremely impatient:

ssh SERVER_URL
    # Install Solr, Ruby 1.9/2.0, Apache, Passenger
    exit
git clone git://github.com/cpence/rletters.git
cd rletters
cp config/deploy/deploy_config.rb.dist config/deploy/deploy_config.rb
$EDITOR config/deploy/deploy_config.rb
# Set server URLs, deployment path
cap deploy:setup
# Answer all the questions
cap deploy:check
cap deploy:update
ssh SERVER_URL
    cd DEPLOYMENT_PATH
    rake RAILS_ENV=production db:schema:load
    $EDITOR /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
    # Add appropriate stanza for DEPLOYMENT_PATH
    exit
cap deploy:migrate
cap deploy:seed
cap deploy:start
# Open up a web browser to http://YOUR_SITE/admin/
# Log in with admin@example.com / password
# CHANGE THOSE DEFAULT CREDENTIALS
# Set up all the administration settings, including the path to the Solr
#   server, custom text and images, etc.

Contributors

Special thanks to all contributors for submitting patches. A full list of contributors including their patches can be found at:

https://github.com/cpence/rletters/contributors

Also, several features of RLetters wouldn’t be possible without the excellent work of other Ruby programmers. Thanks in particular to those behind RSolr and RSolr::Ext, citeproc-ruby, and bibtex-ruby.