Interactive visualization tool for correspondence metadata in CMIF (Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format).
Live Demo: https://dhcraft.org/CorrespExplorer
Purpose
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)
- Links from person and letter details to the correspSearch web search
- Wikidata enrichment (portraits, life dates, professions)
- Visualization views (map, timeline, network, chronicle and others)
- Multi-dimensional filtering (time, language, person, subject, place)
- CSV/JSON export
- URL-based state sharing
Scope and its deliberate limits are in project.md.
Data and rights
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 example correspondence datasets remain with their archives and holders.
Use
- 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:8000
Run 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 4.x (WebGL map rendering), D3.js with D3-Sankey (network and flow diagrams), noUiSlider (time range filtering) and vanilla JavaScript ES6 modules, with no build process.
GitHub Pages serves the main branch. The branch feature/research-dashboards (December 2025) continues the explorer with further views and a refactoring, recorded there as phases 40 to 46. It is not merged, and its phase numbers overlap with Phase 40 on main.
The documentation lives in docs/knowledge/, whose index maps every document. Most knowledge documents are written in German.
How this was built
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) and a code review round on 2026-10-02. 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.
Limits
- 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; tests run by hand in the browser.
- Open findings and planned work are tracked in plan.md.
Licence and citation
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, and 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.
Resources
Contact
Christopher Pollin Digital Humanities Craft OG https://dhcraft.org
