Interactive visualization tool for correspondence metadata in CMIF (Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format).
Live Demo: https://dhcraft.org/CorrespExplorer
CorrespExplorer lets researchers load any CMIF file in the browser and explore the correspondence it describes, without installation or server-side processing.
- CMIF-XML file upload (drag-and-drop or URL), and URLs of the correspSearch API v2.0
- Links from person and letter details to the correspSearch web search
- Wikidata enrichment (portraits, life dates, professions)
- Twelve views (overview, map, correspondents, letters, timeline, topics, places, network, mentions flow, chronicle, activity heatmap, comparison)
- Research paths that guide through the views (Wissenspfade) and a basket (Wissenskorb) with its own analysis page
- Multi-dimensional filtering (time, language, person, subject, place)
- CSV/JSON export
- URL-based state sharing
Scope and its deliberate limits are in project.md.
The tool reads CMIF, the TEI-based exchange format for correspondence metadata. Uploaded data stay in the browser. The bundled example dataset is the Hugo Schuchardt Archiv (HSA), the correspondence of the linguist Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927). Its figures, the further datasets and their sources are documented in data.md, and the handling of uncertain and missing values in uncertainty-specification.md.
The bundled datasets keep the licences their publishers state, see Licence and citation.
- Visit https://dhcraft.org/CorrespExplorer
- Upload a CMIF-XML file or select the example dataset (Hugo Schuchardt Archiv)
- Explore the correspondence through the views of the explorer (overview, map, persons, letters, timeline, network and others)
For local development:
cd docs
python -m http.server 8000
# Visit http://localhost:8000Run the tests in the browser at http://localhost:8000/test.html?test=true. See CLAUDE.md for coding guidelines.
The technology stack is MapLibre GL JS (map), D3 with d3-sankey (network and flow diagrams), noUiSlider (time range), marked (knowledge viewer) and vanilla JavaScript ES modules, with no build process. All libraries and fonts are vendored in docs/vendor/ with their licence files, so the pages load no code from a CDN; only the OpenFreeMap basemap is external.
GitHub Pages serves the main branch. The branch feature/research-dashboards (December 2025, phases 40 to 46 of its own journal) was merged into main on 2026-10-29 (14b2d17).
The documentation lives in docs/knowledge/, whose index maps every document. Most knowledge documents are written in German.
CorrespExplorer began in October 2025 as HerData, a prototype for women in Goethe's correspondence (first commit dbef54b), and became a generic explorer for any CMIF file on 2025-11-26 (9a01c32). Christopher Pollin developed the tool with Promptotyping, an iterative method in which a domain expert and an LLM build a research tool from maintained project knowledge (Promptotyping: Von der Idee zur Anwendung). The harness was Claude Code. Where commits carry a co-author trailer, it names the coding agent: in 2025 mostly an unversioned "Claude", Claude Opus 4.5 from December 2025, Claude Opus 4.8 on the July 2026 licensing commit and Claude Opus 5.5 from October 2026. The project knowledge lives in docs/knowledge/, and CLAUDE.md is the agent's entry point.
Checking is layered. Verification runs the browser test runner docs/test.html, which loads CMIF fixture files through the production parser; there is no CI. Agentic review by LLM agents checked behaviour beyond the tests, among them a prompt for an external review (review-prompt.md) a code review round on 2026-10-02 and a browser test of every view with Playwright on 2026-10-29. Commit 29dfc15 is the state before the knowledge base was aligned with the Promptotyping document templates on 2026-10-28. The episodes in which output looked correct and was not are recorded in the journal.
- The tests cover small fixture files and passed while the October 2026 review still found defects in the interface. Behaviour outside the tested functions is checked only by review.
- There is no continuous integration. The test runner and the browser checks of the views run by hand.
- Open findings and planned work are tracked in plan.md.
Code is licensed under the MIT License (see LICENSE). Documentation and knowledge documents are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Third-party research data is excluded from these terms and keeps the licence its publisher states in the CMIF teiHeader. The bundled Hugo Schuchardt Archiv export is licensed CC BY 4.0 by the Centre for Information Modelling, University of Graz; docs/data/hsa-letters.json is a changed version of it (converted to JSON, indexed, coordinates added from Wikidata), as its meta.modifications states. The bundled Schönbach file is CC0. Details and open points are in docs/knowledge/data.md.
Citation metadata is in CITATION.cff and codemeta.json.
Christopher Pollin Digital Humanities Craft OG https://dhcraft.org