Developed for the NeXT computer, the Cap Gemini PLAO design is built around the concept of a “project,” which Cap Gemini PLAO Technical Manager Michel Jarleton describes as “writing an article or a thesis or a lecture course. A reader always works with this ultimate purpose in mind.” Researchers will therefore download documents from the library to their workstation, collect them into one or more personal corpora of documents, annotate them in various ways, and then establish various sorts of hypertext links between these annotations. On the basis of pathways through the notes, researchers will be able to write up the‘project’ using a built-in text editor.
    The Cap Gemini approach turns all of a reader’s working objects into documents, from the virtual catalog cards through the basic working source texts (in graphic or text mode) with reader annotations, to such computer-generated objects as the lexicon of a source text. A single personal corpus of documents will in many cases form the source material for a number of different reading projects. “The key advantage of our PLAO,” says Jarleton, “is that it offers different views of the same set of documents according to the purpose of the reader.” Since a reader will make different annotations to the same documents for different projects, the PLAO is designed to allow the researcher to navigate only through the specific notes made for a given project, ignoring other annotations that may have been made. As Jarleton says: “researchers need something better than twenty different colors of felt-tip pens to identify their relevant annotations.”.
    As well as its central reading, annotating, and writing facilities, the Cap Gemini PLAO will also offers a number of other facilities, such as full-text search, text content analysis tools, and OCR and scanning resources for the capture of further documents. The full-text search engine uses the Spirit lemmatization software developed by French company Systex for text database applications and plays a vital role in the Cap Gemini PLAO design, since it will allow searches over any component of the reader’s personal corpus, from texts to reader annotations. The content analysis tools, Michel Jarleton explains, are not yet integrated, but the basic architecture would allow the integration of such scholarly aids as concordance tools to build up KWIC lists, or other lexical extraction programs to establish lexica.

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