�ݺ�ߣ

The Ideal Page:
Between Digital
Facsimile and
Medieval Manuscript

Benjamin Albritton, Stanford University Libraries
Robert Sanderson, Los Alamos National Laboratory

2012 Medieval Academy of America Meeting
Saint 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.)

Naïve Approach: Transcribe Images
Directly

Naïve Approach:
Multiple Representations

CCC 26 f. iiiR

Naïve Approach:

CCC 26 f. iiiR Fold A Open

Naïve Approach:

CCC 26 f. iiiR Fold A Open Fold A and B Open

Naïve Approach:

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 Requirements
Working 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 This page intentionally,
but unfortunately,
• Digitization destructive
left blank
• Page no longer exists
• Page only hypothetical

Domain Requirements

3. Non-rectangular pages

• Fashionable heart shaped
manuscripts
• Fragments
• Pages with foldouts

Facsimile of BNF Rothschild 2973
http://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 Images
http://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 Requirements
7. 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 Relationship
The Canvas's top left and bottom right corners correspond to the corners of
a rectangular box around the folio

OAC Annotations to Paint Images

Musical Manuscripts: Parker XXX

Repeated Zones: Frauenfeld Y
112

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

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

Summary
Model:
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
blalbrit@stanford.edu
@bla222

Robert Sanderson
rsanderson@lanl.gov
azaroth42@gmail.com
@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/

�ݺ�ߣ

Maa

Recommended

More Related Content

Viewers also liked (20)

Similar to Maa (20)

Maa