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The Ideal Page: Between Digital
Facsimile and Medieval
Manuscript
Benjamin Albritton, Stanford University LibrariesRobert Sanderson, Los Alamos National Laboratory
2012 Medieval Academy of America MeetingSaint Louis, MO
Overview
• Background• Framing Questions• Working with Digital Surrogates• Supporting a world of linked medieval
knowledge• Initial Experiments and Next Steps
Framing Questions
• What do we study, as medievalists?• What is a manuscript?• What purposes does a digital surrogate serve?• What can we do with traditionally tacit
information? (transcriptions, annotations, etc.)
Working with Surrogates
Naïve Approach: Transcribe Images Directly
Naïve Approach: Multiple Representations
CCC 26 f. iiiR
Naïve Approach: Multiple Representations
CCC 26 f. iiiR Fold A Open
Naïve Approach: Multiple Representations
CCC 26 f. iiiR Fold A Open Fold A and B Open
Naïve Approach: Multiple Representations
CCC 26 f. iiiR Fold A Open Fold A and B Open f. iiiV
Canvas Paradigm• A Canvas is an empty space in which to build up a display• Brings non-collocated information into a single viewing space• Makes explicit that the image is a surrogate
Domain RequirementsWorking at physical item level
provides unique challenges!
1. Only parts of pages may be digitized
• Only illuminations digitized
• Fragments of pages
• Multiple fragments per image
Cod. Sang. 1394: 10.5076/e-codices-csg-1394
Domain Requirements
2. Page may not be digitized at all
• Not "interesting" enough
• Digitization destructive
• Page no longer exists
• Page only hypothetical
This page intentionally,but unfortunately,left blank
Domain Requirements
3. Non-rectangular pages
• Fashionable heart shaped manuscripts
• Fragments
• Pages with foldouts
Facsimile of BNF Rothschild 2973http://www.omifacsimiles.com/brochures/montchen.html
Domain Requirements
4. Alignment of multiple images of same object
• Multi-spectral imaging
• Multiple resolutions
• Image tiling
• Microfilm vs photograph
• Multiple digitizations
Archimedes Palimpsest Multi-Spectral Imageshttp://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/
Domain Requirements
5. Multiple page orders over time• Rebinding
• Scholarly disagreement on reconstruction
6. Different pages of the manuscript held by different institutions
Cod Sang 730: 10.5706/e-codices-csg-0730a
Domain Requirements7. Transcription of:
• Text• Music
• Musical Notation• Performance
• Diagrams Reusing existing resources, such as
TEI, where possible
8. Transcriptions both created and stored in a distributed way, with competing versions
Parker: XXX XXX
Canvas Paradigm
A Canvas is an empty space in which to build up a display• HTML5, SVG, PDF, … even Powerpoint!• Can "paint" many different resources, including text, images and audio, on
to a Canvas
We can use a Canvas to represent a folio of a manuscript.
Distributed nature is fundamental in the requirements• Painting resources, commentary and collaboration• Idea: Use Annotations to do all of those• Annotations can target the Canvas instead of individual Images
Canvas to Page RelationshipThe Canvas's top left and bottom right corners correspond to the corners of a rectangular box around the folio
OAC Annotations to Paint Images
OAC Annotations to Paint Text
Transcription: Morgan 804
Transcription: Morgan 804
Fragments: Cod Sang 1394
Musical Manuscripts: Parker XXX
Missing Pages: Parker CCC 286
Repeated Zones: Frauenfeld Y 112
Rebinding: BNF f.fr. 113-116
Supporting a World of Linked Medieval Knowledge
Those Annotations could be anywhere on the web! • Need to be able to discover them!
Publish / Subscribe Model for Dissemination.• Annotation creators publish annotations as linked data• Annotation consumers harvest from (trusted?) projects, aggregators or
authors • Sync across repositories for sustainability
Anticipated Issues:• Unreliable authors (or spam)• Multiple published versions• Humanist trend to not expose working data
Teaching with Distributed Digital Tools and Surrogates (UVa, Spring 2012)
• Deborah McGrady, UVa: FREN 5150/8510: Textual Bodies: The Making of Books, Authors and Readers in the Middle Ages
• 12-15 graduate students• Use of:
• Images from the Bibliothèque nationale de France• Hosted at Stanford University• Transcription tool: T-PEN (Saint Louis University)• Annotation tool: DM (Drew University)
Using DM to create and manage annotations
A Space for Simple Description
Working Across Tools
Transcriptions in T-PEN
DM for discovery and display
Next Steps for Student Materials
• Extract annotations and transcriptions from tools for:• New display• “Digital appendices” to traditional publication• Personal note stores• New projects• New questions
SummaryModel:Canvas paradigm provides a coherent solution to modeling the layout of medieval manuscripts
• Annotations, and Collaboration, at the heart of the model
Implementation: • Distribution across repositories for images, text, commentary• Consistent methods to access content from many repositories• Encourages tool development by experts in the field
The SharedCanvas model implemented by distributed repositories brings the humanist's primary research objects to their desktop in a powerful, extensible and interoperable fashion
Software, Tools, and Initiatives Mentioned
• Project Blacklight (discovery front-end)– http://projectblacklight.org/
• International Image Interoperability Framework (Image API)– http://lib.stanford.edu/iiif
• Open Annotation (Annotation Data Model)– http://openannotation.org
• SharedCanvas (Aggregated Facsimile Data Model)– http://www.shared-canvas.org
• T-PEN (Transcription tool – Saint Louis University)– http://t-pen.org/TPEN
• DM (General annotation desktop – Drew University)– http://ada.drew.edu/dmproject/
Thank You
Benjamin Albritton [email protected] @bla222
Robert Sanderson [email protected] [email protected] @azaroth42
Web: http://lib.stanford.edu/dmm http://www.shared-canvas.org/Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.2925
Acknowledgements DMSTech Group: http://dmstech.group.stanford.edu/Open Annotation Collaboration: http://www.openannotation.org/
