<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Overview and Setup</span></p> <p>Monk is an open source <strong>digital environment</strong> based around the Seasr analytics engine. Users can log into the Monk servers, access the Monk database, and pass select passages through a variety of Seasr flows. Monk is a web-based project and is accessible through any web browser via their website. Funding for the project ended in 2009 resulting in the programing behind sunset at the same time. No current work is being done on the project.</p> <p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Features</span></p> <p>The Monk project was primarily interested in<strong> creating a functional working environment</strong>. Likewise, Monk offers the user a streamlined process through which they can select text from the Monk corpus, select a tool or flow to operate on the chosen text, then save the results to their own personal profile for later viewing. Unfortunately, Monk does not give the user the option to upload their own text as the project experimented with <strong>building the texts into the platform itself</strong>. The user can choose between several different toolsets to apply to the chosen text as well as the ability to edit and save preferred toolsets. Unfortunately, many of these features are little more than a proof-of-concept and other more up to date tools easily outperform them. As well, many of the implemented features have not been updated to work with the latest versions of certain browsers, and the server no longer supports an important set of analysis tools.</p> <p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Conclusion</span></p> <p>For researchers interested in learning more about the development of tools themselves, Monk is a valuable asset as it represents and <strong>important experiment in interface and environment</strong>. Monk has inspired several other tools who have taken up and further explored the ideas that Monk created. Researchers interested in Monk should explore it as a working prototype, a living example of the thoughts and ideas that went into its creation. However, it probably won&rsquo;t find much use for the actual analysis of texts.</p>