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Fwd: [MEDTEXTL] beyond besic codicology
by Dot Porter 30 Jul '09

30 Jul '09

Bob Peckham posted this to MedTextL, but I'm forwarding it here because I expect folks on this list might have some suggestions for scientific developments. I'm not sure if Bob is on DM so I'm cc:ing him on this, in reply please make sure that you "reply all" so he receives suggestions too. My own suggestion is the Archimedes Palimpsest project website (http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/). The palimpsest is from a ninth-century manuscript and many different techniques were used to bring out the text. There's also interesting work happening in digital approaches to palaeography and codicology (both in classics and in medieval studies). A recent conference, Kodikologie und Paläographie im Digitalen Zeitalter — Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age, organized by the Institute of Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München had as its output (or input, more properly) a collection of essays on the topic, but I'm not sure if the collection is available online (Malte, can you say a bit more?). The Digital Medievalist journal has published a few articles on digital approaches to palaeography, and also illustrations on how technologies can be used for research. See: Peter A. Stokes, "Palaeography and Image-Processing: Some Solutions and Problems" DM 3 (2007-2008) http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/3/stokes/ Arianna Ciula, "Digital palaeography: using the digital representation of medieval script to support palaeographic analysis" DM 1.1 (Spring 2005) http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/1.1/ciula/ Kevin Kiernan, "The source of the Napier fragment of Alfred's Boethius" DM 1.1 (Spring 2005) http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/1.1/kiernan/ For catalogues and cataloguing projects, see the ENRICH project (enrich.manuscriptorium.eu), a project to create a European-wide manuscripts catalogue (using the TEI manuscript description schema). Others on this list can say more about it than I can. I'll copy this onto the MedTextL as well. Dot ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Bob Peckham <bobp(a)utm.edu> Date: Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 11:53 PM Subject: [MEDTEXTL] beyond besic codicology To: MEDTEXTL(a)listserv.illinois.edu I am working on the section of the Any Holt Library which will be similar to what I have done with incunabula. This will be for medieval manuscripts. The first page will feature how scholars deal with manuscripts: paleography and codicology, pecia and other procedures in medieval scriptoria. I am interested in recent scientific developments: techniques for identifying and examining a palimpsest, what DNA analysis id doing for manuscript study. Where do I go to find online material for these? I will include a page on catalogs and cataloging projects, and I will include the work I have already done with CONSULTING MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS http://webpages.charter.net/tbob/medmss.html TBob Robert D. Peckham, Ph.D Professor of French Chair, AATF Commission on Advocacy Director, Globe-Gate Intercultural Web Project Director, Andy Holt Virtual Library Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages Univ. of Tennessee at Martin / Martin TN 38238 Email: bobp(a)utm.edu -- *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Dot Porter (MA, MSLS) Metadata Manager Digital Humanities Observatory (RIA), Regus House, 28-32 Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin 2, Ireland -- A Project of the Royal Irish Academy -- Phone: +353 1 234 2444 Fax: +353 1 234 2400 http://dho.ie Email: dot.porter(a)gmail.com *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

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Unnegotiated editing (was Wiki cum crowdsourcing)
by Daniel Paul O'Donnell 29 Jul '09

29 Jul '09

Hi all, Ondrej Tichy just point this editor out to me as a potential for crowd sourcing structural work: http://cvsdemo.bitfluxeditor.org/examples/uni/index.html Looks quite interesting. You change modes by clicking on the little arrows in the left hand corner. In tag mode, you get a list of possible tags at each insertion point by right clicking. When you try to save XML that doesn't work with schema or is malformed, you get an error. I'm not sure this is ready for naive users, but it is pretty good. It might be useful for teams with collaborating experienced XMLers. Though, maybe not over a svn+local editing system (sorry Ondrej ;) ). -dan -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/) Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/) Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/) Vox: +1 403 329-2377 Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental) Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/

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September workshops in: XML publishing, metadata, collaborative editing
by Peter Robinson 29 Jul '09

29 Jul '09

Dear Digital medievalist list: in view of the current discussion of collaborative transcriptions: the following workshops are likely to be of interest... The Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editions, Birmingham, is hosting three workshops from September 22 to September 25 this year. Two are these are one day workshops: 1. Tuesday 22 September: ‘SDPublisher: a new and different XML publishing system’ This workshop will present a hands-on introduction to SDPublisher, the new XML publishing system developed by people associated with ITSEE and Scholarly Digital Editions: see www.sd-editions.com/SDPublisher . 2. Wednesday 23 September: ‘The Virtual Manuscript Room: linking resources and scholarship on the web’. This workshop will introduce the concepts behind the Virtual Manuscript Room project, and their implementation in the project, with particular emphasis on the use of metadata in the project to link together manuscript images, transcripts and resources related to them. More details of both workshops can be found at http://itsee.bham.ac.uk/vmr/ITSEEworkshops.htm . The third is a two day workshop, on the subject of "Tools for Collaborative Scholarly Editing over the Web", on Thursday 24 and Friday 25 September. The first day, "Actions: the State of the Art" on Thursday 24 September, will be open to all: in this, representatives of projects around the world will give presentations on what they have done, are doing, or plan to do, to develop tools for collaborative scholarly editing over the Web. The second day, 'Problems and Futures' on Friday 25 September, will be a series of discussions on, firstly, three key emerging problem areas (intellectual property/scholarly authority; sustainability and interoperability), and, secondly, on the possible shapes of scholarly editing in the world to come. Attendance at this second day will be by invitation only, with numbers restricted. More details of this workshop can be found at http://itsee.bham.ac.uk/vmr/toolscfp.htm. Attendance at all workshops is open to all (with the restriction to invitees for the Friday 25 September). We have funding from the JISC (the Virtual Manuscript Room) and from the European Science Foundation (through the InterEdition project) and so are able to offer the workshops without charge. We are interested in hearing from anyone who would like to present work they are doing in relation to collaborative editing tools on Thursday 24th, and from anyone who believes that they have something to contribute to the discussions on Friday 25th. Limited cheap accommodation is available close to the workshop venues (in the Orchard Learning Resource Centre, Selly Oak) for those who act quickly. We may be able to offer assistance with travel and accommodation, particularly to people giving presentations on Thursday 24th and taking part in the discussions on Friday 25th. To register, or learn more, please contact either Peter Robinson p.m.robinson(a)bham.ac.uk (the workshops leader) or Richard Goode r.goode(a)bham.ac.uk (the workshops organizer). Peter Robinson Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing Elmfield House, Selly Oak Campus University of Birmingham Edgbaston B29 6LG P.M.Robinson(a)bham.ac.uk p. +44 (0)121 4158441, f. +44 (0) 121 415 8376 www.itsee.bham.ac.uk

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Re: [dm-l] Use of wikis for transcription
by O'Donnell, Dan 28 Jul '09

28 Jul '09

I think in the end that the answer to all these questions depends on how important and what type of result you are looking for. James's answer to the question of OCR is bang on, so I'vw nothing to add there. And as those who've worked with me know, I'm a huge believer in wikis and use them all the time for various, sometimes unorthodox things. Crowd sourcing proof reasing of flat texts a la Gutenberg is a pretty good example of what they might be good at. Though I'd be worried in the case of unnegotiated crows sourcing about incremental version control--i.e. Not that you couldn't see what changes had been made and reverse damage, but that the workflow would be so cumbersome if people started indoing each others corrections that you'd lose any possible efficiencies. I find the belief in the power of agreed upon conventions quite touching if somewhat other worldly. My experience, as an author, editor, journal editor, and scholar is that consistency of application in the absence of validation is impossible. Even in single author works you tend to forget exactly the format you used earlier for, for example, bibliographic format and I've seen too much minor variation among authors who were trying to follow say the chicago style to think that any conventions not subject to validation will be implemented consistently. However this is only important of you plan to do something other than print your texts to the screen. And it is also possible to retrofit markup over proof-read flat text. One last observation is that you can get double keyed text to a guaranteed accuracy of 99.5 or higher for probably about $2-3 a page if you have sufficient volume (99.995% and about $1.50/page for modern print). I'd now consider that route before constructing any particular transcription scheme (there is some hope that the TEI will be offering keying at these prices for smaller jobs later as a membership benefit later this fall, so I've been paying attention to prices lately). ----------- Daniel O'Donnell University of Lethbridge (From my mobile telephone) --- original message --- From: "Buckner" <d3uckner(a)btinternet.com> Subject: Re: [dm-l] Use of wikis for transcription Date: July 28, 2009 Time: 5:4:51 Thanks for these replies. From work on other wikis, in particular Wikipedia, I think 1. Crowdsourcing very poor at anything involving summarisation, synthesis and so on. Hence Wikipedia is good at biographies (which have a set format, and usually follow the progress of someone's life in the obvious order). Very poor at high level subjects like 'History', 'Philosophy', 'Roman Empire' and that sort of thing, where 95% of the work is sourcing the relevant and important facts and so on. 2. There is no problem with conventions - co-editors generally quick to absorb relevant policy, house style and so on (over much, in my view). 3. For these reasons, wikis well suited to translation work (which has absolutely no demands on organisation or synthesis). 4. For similar reasons, transcription would also be well suited for wiki work. 5. What originally drew me to the idea was finding an important medieval work (a critical edition from the 1960's) in a London library where the basement had clearly flooded at some time. The volumes were out of order, there were missing leaves, one volume was even missing. Many important works are not critical editions and are simply transcriptions made by dedicated enthusiasts. These are published in obscure journals like CIMAGL, in courier font, generally not checked by others (in my view - it is easy to locate mistakes), and generally not accessible to the outside world. 6. Thus, publication on a wiki would ensure much better access to important works, and also the opportunity for others to check. 7. Some here have commented on the use of character recognition, which I find bizarre. I studied optical pattern recognition in the 1980's and it was accepted then, and it is still true I think, that machines cannot understand human speech or writing unless they also grasp the semantics. I can work through a text without concentrating on the meaning and I can get probably a 90% success rate. Then I go through again, this time translating as I go along and get a 98% success rate. Finally I go one level higher (it is philosophy I usually translate) and try to understand not just what the writer is literally saying in their language, but what they actually mean, the argument they are making. This gets me to 99% but I am still learning. It is very difficult to transcribe medieval texts without a deep understanding of the *kind* of thing the writer is trying to say. That is because the writer was communicating with his or her (usually his) audience knowing the assumptions they would make and which would not need to be clarified. 8. To give an example, some years ago I hired a Cambridge PhD to help me brush up my Latin. We worked through some medieval texts and we got stuck at 'Minor patet'. He thought this meant 'it is less clear'. In fact, as I soon found out, 'Minor' in this context means 'the minor proposition' (of a syllogism). 9. I did try out my OCR on a manuscript, but it was completely hopeless. Only humans will ever be able to read these things. 10. Thanks for the tips about XML. I do work with XML and indeed I have made many experiments with trying to present images of manuscripts together with the Latin transcript and then an English translation. Another reason for presenting the material like this is that we should no longer be hostage to the person making a transcription, who is often interpreting the Latin in a way that suits their interpretation of grammar and meaning. It was not until I started reading manuscripts that I realised how much of the printed material we read is simply a typographer's invention. For example medieval texts do not generally use the honorific capital. They write 'aristotle' and even 'god', rather than 'Aristotle' or 'God'. Actually they don't even write the full word. There are standard abbreviations for all the commonly used words, such as Aristotle, Priscianus and so on. The only way to present this material is to give the original, a transcript in the original language, and a translation into a modern language. Edward Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Discussion list: dm-l(a)uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

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Use of wikis for transcription
by Buckner 28 Jul '09

28 Jul '09

Hello, I am thinking about setting up a wiki for the purposes of transcribing medieval manuscripts. One such experiment is here http://www.mywikibiz.com/User:Ockham/sandbox Has anyone here heard of a similar project? The advantages of wikis is that many people can work on them, increasing the accuracy of the transcription, and there is an audit trail in case changes need to be reviewed or reversed. Edward Buckner

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gentle introduction to XSL, CSS, and/or stylesheets generally?
by Daniel Paul O'Donnell 18 Jul '09

18 Jul '09

Hi all, I'm putting together a list of background reading for a very compressed introduction workshop. Does anybody know of a good gentle introduction to XSL, CSS, and/or stylesheets generally I could refer students to? Obviously there are hundreds on the web, so what I'm looking for is a battle-tested recommendation. -dan -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/) Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/) Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/) Vox: +1 403 329-2377 Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental) Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/

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Ontologies and Anglo-Saxon England
by Daniel Paul O'Donnell 17 Jul '09

17 Jul '09

In loose relation to Dot's posting the other day... [Forgive cross posting] As part of a project for which we are seeking funding (http://www.visionarycross.org/), we are looking into using ontologies as the basis for building a generalisable platform for connecting representations of Anglo-Saxon cultural objects, tropes, texts, and the like (the specific details of this approach, which we've been developing over the last year, are still too nascent to be reflected in the website). The idea would be to see if there might not be a way of building a common, discipline-wide, set of minimal ontological distinctions that museums, literary and historical scholars, archaeologists, etc. could then use to place their particular objects of study in the larger context of the work of everybody else who has used the same ontology. If any other groups are working on the use of ontologies to represent any aspect of the study of Anglo-Saxon England, I'd very much like to hear from you. I suspect at the moment people working on this are mostly likely to be in museums, libraries, or archaeology, but could be wrong. I'm considering putting together a grant application that would help fund the development of common standards and systems. Of course, with ISAS coming up, their might be some opportunities to meet in the next fortnight as well. Obviously at this stage, the idea is still fairly exploratory. -Dan O'Donnell -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/) Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/) Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/) Vox: +1 403 329-2377 Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidential) Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/

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RDF in digital medieval studies?
by Dot Porter 16 Jul '09

16 Jul '09

Hello everyone, I'm looking for examples of projects in the digital humanities that use RDF for storing metadata. Does anyone on the list have examples of projects in the digital medieval studies that are using RDF? Many thanks, Dot -- *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Dot Porter (MA, MSLS) Metadata Manager Digital Humanities Observatory (RIA), Regus House, 28-32 Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin 2, Ireland -- A Project of the Royal Irish Academy -- Phone: +353 1 234 2444 Fax: +353 1 234 2400 http://dho.ie Email: dot.porter(a)gmail.com *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

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Junicode font, version 0.6.17
by Peter Baker 12 Jul '09

12 Jul '09

For those who don't know about Junicode, it is an effort to provide a font that 1.) is free; 2.) is reasonably attractive; and 3.) contains characters of interest to medievalists which typically are not included in the products of commercial type foundries. There are several other very fine fonts for medievalists (notably Andron Scriptor and Cardo), but few offer matching bold and italic faces and numerous advanced typographical features. This version of Junicode includes substantial additions, bug fixes and design improvements. All of the recent medievalist additions to Unicode have now been added in the regular and italic faces. Almost all Medieval Unicode Font Initiative characters are now available in the regular face, and most of them in italic. Obsolete characters (those formerly encoded in the Private Use Area which have been assigned Unicode encodings) have been marked with an x to remind users to use the new encodings; a file called "replacements" has been provided to help users write scripts to automate the updating of their files. As an alternative, a new OpenType feature (ss03) has been added to make the necessary substitutions on the fly. This release is a big advance over the previous one, and I urge all who use Junicode to upgrade. Get it as http://junicode.sourceforge.net/. Best wishes to all, Peter Baker

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Seminar: "Edizioni Digitali alla ricerca di standards"
by Digital Medievalist: digitalmedievalistnews 08 Jul '09

08 Jul '09

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