Linking Text and Image with SVG

Annotation and linking (or referring) have been described as "scholarly primitives", basic methods used in scholarly research and publication of all kinds. The online publication of manuscript images is one basic use case where the need for linking and annotation is very clear. High resolution images are of great use to scholars and transcriptions of texts provide for search and browsing, so the ideal method for the digital publication of manuscript works is the presentation of page images plus a transcription of the text therein. This has become a standard method, but leaves open the questions of how deeply the linkages can be done and how best to handle the annotation of sections of the image. This paper presents a new method (named img2xml) for connecting text and image using an XML-based tracing of the text on the page image. The tracing method was developed as part of a series of experiments in text and image linking beginning in the summer of 2008 and will continue under a grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It employs Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to represent the text in an image of a manuscript page in a referenceable form and enables linking and annotation of the page image in a variety of ways. The paper goes on to discuss the scholarly requirements for tools that will be developed around the tracing method, and explores some of the issues raised by the img2xml method

Digitized Manuscripts and Open Licensing

This report examines the issue of copyright law in digitizing manuscripts and making images available online. Specifically, it looks at the possible solutions provided by Creative Commons

Rebooting TEI Pointers

The TEI Guidelines has for years contained a section on XPointer schemes which, unfortunately, has suffered from a lack of implementations. The reasons for this include the difficulty of the concepts in this section and a lack of sufficient detail in their specification. Despite this lack of use, the author feels that TEI pointers address an important set of use cases and should receive more attention. The chief advantage of TEI pointers is that they permit stand-off markup and annotation of text that is either unmarked or marked up inappropriately for the intended annotation. Their promise is a mechanism for leveraging stand-off markup and annotations of TEI documents—for example, being able to link to annotations in a document view because those annotations point to parts of the document. This paper provides some background on TEI pointers and their possible uses, and outlines the state of efforts under way to rework this section of the Guidelines by providing a more detailed specification and reference implementations

Ktêma es aiei: Digital Permanence from an Ancient Perspective

This chapter looks at digital publishing from the perspective of surviving texts from the ancient world, the works of Vergil, Sappho 31, and the Res Gestae Divi Augusti. It asks what looking at examples of very long-term survival may have to tell us about digital preservation in the modern era

Towards Resolution Services for Text URIs

In this paper we address the lack of fully resolvable URIs for texts and their citable units in the currently emerging Graph of Ancient World Data. We identify three main architectural components that are required to provide resolution services for text URIs: 1) a registry of text services; 2) an identifier resolution service; 3) a document metadata scheme, to represent the relations between texts in the registry, as well as between these texts and related external resources (e.g. library catalogues). After presenting some of the use cases a central registry providing resolvable URIs for texts would enable, we discuss in detail each component. We conclude by considering three examples where the proposed document metadata scheme is used to describe digital texts; this scheme contains a minimum yet extendable set of metadata that can be used to explore and aggregate texts coming from a network of distributed repositories

Critical Editions and the Data Model as Interface

Critical editions of classical text pose some unique problems that highlight the importance of the editor’s contribution to the creation of the edition. The article discusses the issues involved in creating these editions and proposes a method for creating digital critical editions that foregrounds the edition’s data model, thereby enabling an intuitive and powerful interface for reading digital critical editions online. It presents the results of experiments with this method that are being undertaken by the Digital Latin Library project, a joint effort of the Society for Classical Studies, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Renaissance Society of America

The Digital Critical Apparatus: Thoughts from the Field

In this article, we continue the discussion about the future of critical editions begun in volume 112 of The Classical Journal by Keeline and continued in volume 114 by Olson. Written from the point of view of two scholars working in the field of digital philology, the article affirms some elements of Keeline’s vision and addresses Olson’s concerns about that vision. Concrete examples from an active pro-ject that seeks to translate the visual elements of traditional critical editions into machine-readable data reveal that Keeline and Olson’s views are not as far apart as they seem.Copyright © 2022 The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. This article first appeared in The Classical Journal, Volume 117, Issue 3, February-March, 2022, pages 337-355. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press for The Classical Association of the Middle West and South.YesThe article was reviewed by an anonymous reviewer

Standards for Networking Ancient Person-data: Digital approaches to problems in prosopographical space

Prosopographies disambiguate names appearing in sources by creating lists of persons, but the progress of scholarship now makes these lists difficult to maintain. In a digital context unique stable identifiers can be reshuffled ad libitum when searching and ordering information. Digital data increasingly brings together complementary research outputs: the Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies project takes on the challenge of creating an aggregated resource, adopting a Linked Open Data approach. In this paper we shall present three case studies highlighting the promise and problems of encoding unambiguous identities, titulature and other disambiguating information, and treating divine figures as person-data, respectively. Digital approaches are tools for research, assisting rather than replacing the historian, who remains central to the research endeavor

Distributed Text Services (DTS): A Community-Built API to Publish and Consume Text Collections as Linked Data

This paper presents the Distributed Text Service (DTS) API Specification, a community-built effort to facilitate the publication and consumption of texts and their structures as Linked Data. DTS was designed to be as generic as possible, providing simple operations for navigating collections, navigating within a text, and retrieving textual content. While the DTS API uses JSON-LD as the serialization format for non-textual data (e.g., descriptive metadata), TEI XML was chosen as the minimum required format for textual data served by the API in order to guarantee the interoperability of data published by DTS-compliant repositories. This paper describes the DTS API specifications by means of real-world examples, discusses the key design choices that were made, and concludes by providing a list of existing repositories and libraries that support DTS

Graph Data-Models and Semantic Web Technologies in Scholarly Digital Editing

This volume is based on the selected papers presented at the Workshop on Scholarly Digital Editions, Graph Data-Models and Semantic Web Technologies, held at the Uni- versity of Lausanne in June 2019. The Workshop was organized by Elena Spadini (University of Lausanne) and Francesca Tomasi (University of Bologna), and spon- sored by the Swiss National Science Foundation through a Scientific Exchange grant, and by the Centre de recherche sur les lettres romandes of the University of Lausanne. The Workshop comprised two full days of vibrant discussions among the invited speakers, the authors of the selected papers, and other participants.1 The acceptance rate following the open call for papers was around 60%. All authors – both selected and invited speakers – were asked to provide a short paper two months before the Workshop. The authors were then paired up, and each pair exchanged papers. Paired authors prepared questions for one another, which were to be addressed during the talks at the Workshop; in this way, conversations started well before the Workshop itself. After the Workshop, the papers underwent a second round of peer-review before inclusion in this volume. This time, the relevance of the papers was not under discus- sion, but reviewers were asked to appraise specific aspects of each contribution, such as its originality or level of innovation, its methodological accuracy and knowledge of the literature, as well as more formal parameters such as completeness, clarity, and coherence. The bibliography of all of the papers is collected in the public Zotero group library GraphSDE20192, which has been used to generate the reference list for each contribution in this volume. The invited speakers came from a wide range of backgrounds (academic, commer- cial, and research institutions) and represented the different actors involved in the remediation of our cultural heritage in the form of graphs and/or in a semantic web en- vironment. Georg Vogeler (University of Graz) and Ronald Haentjens Dekker (Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, Humanities Cluster) brought the Digital Humanities research perspective; the work of Hans Cools and Roberta Laura Padlina (University of Basel, National Infrastructure for Editions), as well as of Tobias Schweizer and Sepi- deh Alassi (University of Basel, Digital Humanities Lab), focused on infrastructural challenges and the development of conceptual and software frameworks to support re- searchers’ needs; Michele Pasin’s contribution (Digital Science, Springer Nature) was informed by his experiences in both academic research, and in commercial technology companies that provide services for the scientific community. The Workshop featured not only the papers of the selected authors and of the invited speakers, but also moments of discussion between interested participants. In addition to the common Q&A time, during the second day one entire session was allocated to working groups delving into topics that had emerged during the Workshop. Four working groups were created, with four to seven participants each, and each group presented a short report at the end of the session. Four themes were discussed: enhancing TEI from documents to data; ontologies for the Humanities; tools and infrastructures; and textual criticism. All of these themes are represented in this volume. The Workshop would not have been of such high quality without the support of the members of its scientific committee: Gioele Barabucci, Fabio Ciotti, Claire Clivaz, Marion Rivoal, Greta Franzini, Simon Gabay, Daniel Maggetti, Frederike Neuber, Elena Pierazzo, Davide Picca, Michael Piotrowski, Matteo Romanello, Maïeul Rouquette, Elena Spadini, Francesca Tomasi, Aris Xanthos – and, of course, the support of all the colleagues and administrative staff in Lausanne, who helped the Workshop to become a reality. The final versions of these papers underwent a single-blind peer review process. We want to thank the reviewers: Helena Bermudez Sabel, Arianna Ciula, Marilena Daquino, Richard Hadden, Daniel Jeller, Tiziana Mancinelli, Davide Picca, Michael Piotrowski, Patrick Sahle, Raffaele Viglianti, Joris van Zundert, and others who preferred not to be named personally. Your input enhanced the quality of the volume significantly! It is sad news that Hans Cools passed away during the production of the volume. We are proud to document a recent state of his work and will miss him and his ability to implement the vision of a digital scholarly edition based on graph data-models and semantic web technologies. The production of the volume would not have been possible without the thorough copy-editing and proof reading by Lucy Emmerson and the support of the IDE team, in particular Bernhard Assmann, the TeX-master himself. This volume is sponsored by the University of Bologna and by the University of Lausanne. Bologna, Lausanne, Graz, July 2021 Francesca Tomasi, Elena Spadini, Georg Vogele