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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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Teuchos - An Online Knowledge-based Platform for Classical Philology
by Digital Medievalist: digitalmedievalistnews 08 Jul '09

08 Jul '09

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Manuscript Imaging Question
by Daniel Paul O'Donnell 07 Jul '09

07 Jul '09

Hi all, I thought I'd pass this on to our list and digital classicist, since some of us may have had experience with similar techniques (I'm relatively sure I saw a talk on the question recently). Please make sure you cc Dr. Wisnicki, since he may not hang out in our circles! I’ve come across a textual issue that I’m not sure how to resolve, and I’m hoping that someone on the list might have some suggestions or even the answer. I’m currently doing some research on the final African diaries of David Livingstone, the missionary and explorer. While keeping these diaries, Livingstone was often short of paper and, as a result, resorted to various expedients to keep the diaries going. One of these expedients was to take printed pages from books and newspapers, and, by turning the pages 90 degrees, to write his diary over the printed text, but perpendicular to it. Although perhaps legible at the time, these diary entries now are often difficult to decipher: Livingstone’s ink has faded and the printed text obscures what remains. So, in other words, the diary entries have two layers of text: printed matter which runs horizontally across the page, and Livingstone’s entries which run vertically. I’ve scanned some of these pages and was wondering if there’s a way (or, perhaps, a program) by which I might remove the printed layer so as to make the handwritten layer freestanding and so more legible. Has anyone on the list dealt with (and resolved) a similar issue? If so, please email me at awisnicki(a)yahoo.com -- any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Dr. Adrian S. Wisnicki Honorary Research Fellow School of English and Humanities Birkbeck College, University of London -- 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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Codex Sinaiticus at the British Library
by George FERZOCO 06 Jul '09

06 Jul '09

The world’s oldest bible reunited online ... http://www.bl.uk/news/2009/pressrelease20090703.html http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/ http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/project/conference.aspx Best wishes, George Ferzoco -- George FERZOCO gpferzoco(a)gmail.com

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