Does anyone know of any prior work in the area of image markup tools, to enable scholars to markup letterforms (and their constituent strokes) on images of texts?
There is the UVic Image Markup tool:
and the Edition Production and PresentantionTechnology tool:
Dot Porter did a good roundup of the various work going on in this area here: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dh2007/abstracts/xhtml.xq?id=250
which also points to Digital Incunabula:
as more simple tools to link images and text.
Is there is anyone out there on Stoa using an image markup tool (other than PhotoShop) to trace letter forms over images of text? Any good tools out there that we should know about?
Hi Melissa,
Most paleographic description that I’m aware of (not that there is much) has focused on the description of letterforms within markup (“high ascender”, “round”, etc.) and not on tracing the forms themselves. Aside from Vindolanda, of course. There’s a lot of work to be done here on the encoding side – TEI really doesn’t do well for paleographical description, and I haven’t really seen any extensions that satisfy me (as I say, not that there are many). I know this doesn’t really address your question, but the general issue is an important one and I only wish I had more time to think about it myself.
Thanks Dot. That was what I presumed – still, four years after the Vindolanda project – but I thought it prudent to check before we start gearing things up to develop a workspace tool to mark up palaeographic data.
Sean Gillies and I (mostly Sean) took a quick whack today at the basic tracing task (and producing SVG from it) using the OpenLayers toolkit. More here: http://zcologia.com/news/691/digitizing-ancient-inscriptions-with-openlayers/
That’s pretty sweet, Tom. I’d probably use it for delimiting bounding boxes (RoI) and then link those to annotations or text encoding. This looks like a very nice way to get SVG that you could reuse elsewhere, too (like, say, in a TEI document).