Edition Production Technology: an Eclipse-Based Platform for Building Image-Based Electronic Editions

We are developing the Edition Production Technology (EPT),
an integrated development environment for building
Image-based Electronic Editions (IBEE) (Kiernan 2005),
through the Electronic Boethius (Kiernan and Porter 2005) and
ARCHway Projects (Kiernan et al. 2004; Kiernan et al. 2005)
at the University of Kentucky. We built the EPT using Java,
and it operates through the Eclipse platform, benefiting from
Eclipse’s open architecture and portability. Currently the EPT
runs on Windows XP, Linux, and Mac OS X.
The goal of the EPT is to provide software support for building
image-based electronic editions of cultural manuscripts. Starting
with images and text, the EPT enables the editor to create an
electronic edition with complex, pervasive XML encodings,
search the electronic edition, link text and images, and deploy
the completed electronic edition using filters and XSLT.
A fully functional demo version of the EPT software suite for
PC, including sample projects, is available for download at <h
ttp://rch01.rch.uky.edu/~ept/download> . Figure 1. A snapshot of EPT illustrating image-based encoding through
ImagText, xMarkup, and xTagger (including an XML view). The figure also
shows the Keyboard panel and Search Tool.
Editorial Tools on EPT Platform
• Project wizard initializes an electronic edition project. The
input data consists of image files, text content (or partially
encoded text) and one or more DTDs (EPT provides support
for concurrent markup using multiple DTDs).
• xMarkup, xTagger and ImagText form the core component
for encoding image-based, document-centric XML, working
together to link text and image. Through xMarkup, the editor
selects edition markup through a series of simple,
configurable templates. xTagger introduces markup into
the text and provides filtered XML views, while ImagText
associates that text section with the corresponding image
region, selected by the editor. In summary, the tagging
works as follows: the editor selects text and image (in any
order), describes the manuscript or textual feature, choosing
tags and attribute values through xMarkup, and inserts the
markup. See Figure 1 for an illustration of the cooperation
between xMarkup, xTagger, and ImagText. The xTagger
ensures that the new markup is well-formed and potentially
valid (Iacob, Dekhtyar, and Dekhtyar).
• DucType provides a specialized interface for describing
individual manuscript letters. The editor configures DucType
through the Letter Template, which also creates and
maintains a repository of letter images for a manuscript.
The letter images are then used by the DucType tool as base
of comparison with any letter image in manuscript image.
• Overlay provides image manipulation support. An editor
may find that multiple images of the same folio are required
for a complete view of the manuscript. Using this tool the
editor lays one image over another image of the same folio
(using, for instance, ultraviolet and normal lightening
conditions) and changes the transparency of the upper layer,
enabling a useful comparison of the two images.
• SaMod is a specialized tool for creating manuscript text
collations with text from multiple sources (for example, the
same text found in different manuscripts). This tool
recognizes differences between transcripts and marks up
these differences as variants of the text the editor identifies
as the base text.
• StaTend: Using a transcript marked with basic navigational
markup – folio and folio line tags – this tool calculates
manuscript statistical tendencies (number of folios, lines
per folio, characters per line, etc.). Based on these statistical
tendencies the tool reconstructs missing folios for which
we can supply the text from another source, based on these
statistics. The StaTend tool also includes functionality,
called RamSome, for taking these textual 'virtual folios' and
translating the text into image, built character by character
using letters taken from the manuscript.
• Quires is a specialized interface for the edition and
visualization of codicological markup. It allows the editor
to build a virtual map of the physical object. We used this
tool in the Electronic Boethius project to reconstruct the
gatherings of a manuscript whose binding was destroyed
by fire.
• The Search GUI is an interface for searching the edition.
The editor can configure it to search any combination of
XML markup, while hiding the intricacies of the query
language (an extension of XPath that supports multiple
hierarchies).
• Datalayer is the API for data access in EPT. Tools request
and deliver edition data (image and text files, DTDs, etc.)
through the Datalayer API, which can interface with a
variety of data storage devices, whether a database, file
system, or remote server.
• Glossary is a data-centric XML editor for creating a glossary
including each word from the edition text. It automatically
generates a complete word list from a transcript file encoded
with basic formatting information (folio and folio line
markup. The glossary links its entries to the text through
the <word> tag – changes made within the edition text are
automatically reflected in the glossary. It provides
customizable templates for parts of speech and tools for
saving the information in XML format (used later on for
searching purposes) and HTML format (used for display
glossed information).
• The HTML browser provides HTML display and general
browser support in EPT. Having a browser integrated in the
platform enables the EPT to direct XSL transformations
dynamically to the browser. • The Keyboard panel enables the editor to configure
keyboards containing special characters (Old English æ,ð,
and þ, Greek characters, etc.).
In addition to editorial tools, the EPT provides support for
project management such as: Project properties editor is a GUI
for various settings related to the project, such as fonts,
encoding, title, etc. It provides support for adding and removing
project images and for customizing markup tags, grouping tags
in meaningful use categories, assigning aliases to tags and
attributes, and adding and removing DTDs from a project. XML
filter allows the editor to create encoding filters for viewing
different combinations of elements from the entire set. The
output of a filter can be used for visualization, XSL
transformation, or data interchange. Extended XPath search is
a search GUI using extended XPath language (an extension of
XPath that applies to concurrent markup structures).
From the Eclipse platform, EPT inherits three important features
for project development: versioning control (CVS), automatic
updates, and help content support. The editing team uses CVS
to share project work-in-progress and as projects repository.
Updates are useful for providing tools updates as well as bug
fixes: an EPT user need only check for updates and download
them if available. Finally, the open help architecture enables
the editor to create and use help files in such a way that the
application help information is added independently of the
application program.
Demo overview
Our demonstration will begin with examples of the most basic
EPT functionality, and depending on time we will demonstrate
any tool or function. We will begin by creating a project and
going through the usual operations for preparing an image-based
electronic edition: content markup (using only text projections
or filtered XML views), automatic linking of images and text,
and text updates. We will demonstrate that our document-centric
XML editor (xTagger) can significantly simplify and speed up
the encoding process. The editor can search for the information,
visualize the encodings using customizable filters, or change
project properties at any point in the editorial process. We will
demonstrate the support for overlapping markup structures by
adding/removing DTDs and markup encodings from external
files. Depending on the interests of the audience, we can also
show how a project can be customized, starting with user
interfaces (toolbox, fonts, encodings, etc.) and ending with
markup customization: associating aliases to tag elements and
attributes, grouping tag elements by functionality, and
displaying status bar information based on XPath queries. We
will also be prepared to demonstrate Quires, Overlay, and
DucType, and show how to customize DucType. Statistical
information for the project encodings can be obtained
dynamically and we can show how this information can be used
in folio reconstruction (text and image) for missing manuscript
part. We can also demonstrate SaMod, showing how it collates
several different texts.
The demo may also include automatic generation of HTML
content from edition data (glossaries, manuscript edition and
manuscript transcription).
We emphasize during the demonstration how the Eclipse’s
open architecture is an excellent platform choice for
implementing the EPT.
Bibliography
Iacob, Ionut Emil, Alex Dekhtyar, and Michael I. Dekhtyar.
"Checking Potential Validity of XML Documents."
Proceedings, Seventh International Workshop on the Web and
Databases, WebDB@SIGMOD/PODS. 2004. 91-96.
Kiernan, Kevin S. "Digital Facsimiles in Editing: Some
Guidelines for Editors of Image-based Scholarly Editions."
Electronic Textual Editing. Forthcoming. A volume of essays
jointly sponsored by the Modern Language Association and
the TEI Consortium, funded by the Mellon Foundation, and
co-edited by John Unsworth, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and
Lou Burnard, 2005.
Kiernan, Kevin S., Alex Dekhtyar, Jurek Jaromczyk, Dorothy
C. Porter, and Ionut Emil Iacob. "Edition Production
Technology (EPT) and the ARCHway Project." DigiCULT.Info
(August 2004): 36-38.
Kiernan, Kevin S., Jurek Jaromczyk, Alex Dekhtyar, Dorothy
C. Porter, Kenneth Hawley, Sandeep Bodapati, and Ionut Emil
Iacob. "The ARCHway Project: Architecture for Research in
Computing for Humanities through Research, Teaching, and
Learning." Literary and Linguistic Computing (Forthcoming).
Special issue, papers from Joint International Conference of
the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the
Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, 2003
Kiernan, Kevin S., and Dorothy C. Porter. "Edition Production
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