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

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

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

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

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

Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces

The present volume “Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces” is the follow-up publication of the same-titled symposium that was held in 2016 at the University of Graz and the twelfth volume of the publication series of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE). It is the result of a successful collaboration between members of the Centre for Information Modelling at the University of Graz, the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network DiXiT, a EC Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, and the IDE. All articles have undergone a peer reviewing process and are published in Open Access. They document the current state of research on design, application and implications of both user and machine interfaces in the context of digital scholarly editions. The editors of the volume are grateful to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions for enabling not only the symposium in 2016 but also the publication of the present volume with their financial support. Special thanks are also due to the staff of the Centre for Information Modelling, above all Georg Vogeler, who contributed to the successful organisation and completion of the symposium and this volume with their ideas and continuous support. Furthermore we want to thank all authors as well as all peer reviewers for the professional cooperation during the publication process. Last but not least we want to thank the many people involved in creating the present volume: Barbara Bollig (Trier) for language corrections and formal suggestions, Bernhard Assmann and Patrick Sahle (Cologne) for support and advises during the typese ing process, Selina Galka (Graz) for verifying and archiving (archive.org) all referenced URLs in January 2018, Julia Sorouri (Cologne) for the design of the cover as well as the artist Franz Konrad (Graz), who provided his painting “Desktop” (www.franzkonrad.com/gallery/desktop-2008-2010/) as cover image. We hope you enjoy reading and get as much intrigued by the topic “Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces” as we did

Image to XML (img2xml)

The img2xml ("image to XML") project plans to develop a 100% Open Source set of components for the linking and display of manuscript images, transcriptions and annotations. The linking will be based on a Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) tracing of the text in the manuscript image, which will then be analyzed and displayed via a web browser interface using tools developed for web-based map viewing. This means that links can be made to and from a graphical representation of the actual text on the page rather than a box drawn around it. The proposed approach will enable linking between text and image in a more fine-grained way than any annotation tool currently in existence. This work represents a fundamentally different way of connecting manuscript images with transcriptions and annotations

#Alt-Academy: Alternative Careers for Academic Scholars

This e-book is the first volume of the online publication #Alt-Academy. Edited by Bethany Nowviskie, this volume contains all 24 essays published by the 32 authors who contributed to #Alt-Academy's initial collection. The following text, also by Nowviskie, is from the 2011 website launch: #Alt-Academy was created by and for people with deep training and experience in the humanities, working or seeking employment — generally off the tenure track, but within the academic orbit — in universities and colleges, or allied knowledge and cultural heritage institutions such as museums, libraries, academic presses, historical societies, and governmental humanities organizations. The work of such institutions is enriched and enabled by capable “alternative academics.” Although they are rarely conventionally-employed as faculty members, the people contributing to #Alt-Academy maintain a research and publication profile and bring their methodological and theoretical training to bear every day on problem-sets of great importance to higher education. For some, keeping their considerable talents within the academy can feel more difficult than making a switch to private-sector careers. Class divisions among faculty and staff are profound, and the suspicion or (worse) condescension with which so-called “failed academics” are met can be disheartening. For all that, these authors love their work. Many on the #alt-ac track describe the satisfaction of making teams (and systems, and programs) work, of solving problems and making or enabling breakthroughs in research and scholarship in their disciplines, and of contributing to and experiencing the life of the mind in ways they did not imagine when they entered grad school. #Alt-Academy is for everyone building skills and experience in precisely those areas of the academy that are most in flux, and most in need of guidance and attention by sensitive, capable, imaginative, and well-informed scholar-practitioners