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Hi!
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The future of CATMA — good news!
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Many of you won’t know this, but our previous round of funding came to an end in March this year. From April 2023 until the end of March 2026, CATMA was funded by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre (StIL; Foundation for Innovation in University Teaching), as part of the forTEXT-Portal project. We would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to StIL for their support and for placing their trust in us! Keeping CATMA running and developing it further would not be possible without such funding opportunities.
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We are also very pleased to announce that we have secured funding for the next three years of CATMA’s development! This time, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; German Research Foundation) has stepped in to help us carry CATMA into the future — thank you also to them! In fact, we already started on the next phase in April. Even better, the team has grown: Stefanie Messner, who was already part of the forTEXT-Portal team, is now officially part of the CATMA team. Stefanie is a seasoned user experience and interface designer, as well as a literary scholar. We also have another experienced full-time developer, Immanuel von Detten, on board. Welcome to both of them!
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Over the next three years, our goal is to make CATMA even more intuitive, sustainable, and future-ready. After 18 years of supporting undogmatic annotation and text analysis, we want to ensure the tool remains a reliable resource for researchers for many years to come. Major goals for this project period include separating frontend and backend, redesigning the user interface, and improving the overall user experience. We are also expanding GitMA and working on new features across the CATMA ecosystem.
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A heartfelt thank you also goes out to our community for your trust, support, and feedback. Your engagement helps shape CATMA’s future, and we’re excited about what lies ahead. 🧡
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Version 7.3 released
We released version 7.3 at the end of June. With it came some important improvements to the distribution visualization:
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Zero values are now correctly shown on the graph. Previously, when one of the 10%-bins on the x-axis didn’t contain any occurrences, no dot was drawn for that bin, causing a line to be drawn directly from the dot in the preceding bin to the dot in the following bin. This made it appear as though the bin wasn’t actually empty. Now, the line will correctly be drawn down to zero on the x-axis.
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The steps on the y-axis are now increments of one. Previously, fractional numbers were displayed on the y-axis, which didn’t make any sense.
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We also fixed the KWIC export for right-to-left texts, so that the order of text tokens wasn’t suddenly reversed in the exported CSV file.
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Lastly, we made a number of smaller improvements in the user interface related to icons, labels, form state, automatic focusing of input fields, and more.
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Standalone version released
This is kind of a big one too. Almost from the moment CATMA went from being a desktop application to a web application many years ago, some of our users have expressed a wish, or even a need, for a version that can work independently of the public instance or even offline.
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Although it has always been possible to self-host CATMA, this required a substantial amount of technical know-how, and was also hampered by a lack of relevant documentation. We are happy to tell you that what we’re calling “CATMA Standalone” is now available, and you can read all about it on its dedicated documentation page.
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Documentation updated
Since the release of CATMA 7.2 early last year, and with the help of some wonderful student assistants, a significant effort has also been made to improve our user documentation. Apart from a few last stragglers, you will now find the documentation to be more detailed, accurate for the current version, and with updated screenshots. So if you haven’t checked it out in a while, or have always wondered about one thing or the other, go take a look! The How-To section is especially worth exploring (we think so anyway).
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We also overhauled the documentation in our GitHub repository, by the way, to provide better guidance for people who want to dive into the technical side of CATMA.
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Workshops
You may be wondering why we didn’t offer a public workshop in the first half of this year. That is because there were actually a number of CATMA workshops hosted by other institutions or groups — with our involvement — and also because there seems to be less of a demand (hopefully because our documentation is better now?).
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If you aren’t already, consider also following us on our social media channels (see footer), as such announcements by themselves often don’t justify sending out a newsletter.
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Your Feedback
We already mentioned at the start that your feedback is important to us. Feedback on this newsletter, feedback on CATMA itself, and feedback on anything related.
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To be honest, we already have loooong lists of things that could be better. Please do keep telling us about that stuff! But also, it would be awesome if you could send us some love occasionally, when you notice something praiseworthy. It tells us that doing what we do is important to you, keeps us motivated and makes the world a better place 🫶
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You know where you can find us — we’re happy with any outreach, either here via email or on social media. Thank you for reading this far and until the next newsletter!
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Please don't hesitate to get in touch whenever you have any questions.
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