Hi all, lately I've been using (read: experimenting mostly) the excellent Image Markup Tool by M. Holmes (http://www.tapor.uvic.ca/~mholmes/image_markup/index.php) together with the TEI P5 <facsimile> element to markup areas of the Vercelli Book manuscript images to the corresponding transcription in XML format. From the beginning, I thought about two distinct ways to link text and image:
1. hot-spot functionality: define specific areas of the folio (decorated initials, marginalia, erasures and corrections, etc.) to be linked to explanatory text (such as paleographical and editorial notes); 2. direct image-transcription linking: define every line in the manuscript as an area linked to the corresponding text of the transcription; the idea being that clicking on a line in the ms image would take you to the corresponding text line, and viceversa.
While I have little concerns about 1 and will surely proceed as intended, I'm having second thoughts about 2, especially after giving a paper at a conference in Pavia (Medieval Texts-Contemporary Media: The Art and Science of Editing in the Digital Age http://lettere.unipv.it/?pagina=p&titolo=MedievalTexts) on this very subject and discussing it a little with other participants afterwards. I wonder which approach is best on usability grounds:
1. linking line to line as originally planned: the disadvantage being that, moving forward while browsing the images or the transcription text, the connection between the two would be lost, (status disruption, a possibly cause of uncertainty for the user); 2. synchronising text and image in a permanent way: navigating the images would have the transcription text scrolling accordingly, and viceversa; the alignment would be guaranteed, but could be a little heavy on resources perhaps (alignment might be disabled an re-enabled though); 3. giving up on a line to line alignment for a simpler page to page linking: surely less flexible, would require less encoding and less resources.
Which solution is best, in your opinion? Are you working on similar text-image linking projects? What have you decided to do?
Thanks in advance,
Roberto