Examples of Images in Text Editing

In 2002, Computers and the Humanities dedicated an issue
to “Image-based Humanities Computing” at a time when
“a majority of first generation image-based humanities
computing projects have reached at least an initial plateau of
completion.” (Kirschenbaum, p. 3) Since that time interest in
incorporating primary source images into “text” editions has
blossomed, as can be attested by recent threads on the TEI
listserv and work on the TEI council to develop
recommendations for specific methods for integrating image
files – and pointers to areas of image files – into traditional text
encoding projects. The number of image-based projects has
multiplied in that time as well, although it takes some effort to
find who is working on such projects. There is not (yet) a central
listing of all image-based TEI projects under development.
Practical work has been done on tool development since 2002
as well. As of March 1, 2007 there are no less than six tools of
which I am aware that serve to edit or display images within
the context of text editing. The majority of these tools are for
linking text and image for digital display.1 Add to these
additional tools for the simple annotation of images2 and tools
for tagging multimedia.3 Undoubtedly, the proliferation of tools
focused on image editing and display reflects a growing interest
in incorporating images into digital editions.
The number of tools available for working with text plus image
in digital editing highlights a simple truth: projects and their
sources are different, and technologies that will work for one
project might be incompatible with another. On the other hand,
technologies applicable in simple circumstances might be
expanded and combined with other technologies to suit much
more complex situations. In this presentation, I will describe
the sources of two digital projects with reference to their
requirements for becoming viable digital projects. One is quite
simple and the other complex, but the same methods inform
both projects.
MS Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 25, the subject of the
Digital Edition of Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 25 ,
(Pembroke 25 project) directed by Paul Szarmach, Director of
the Medieval Academy of America, and Thomas N. Hall at the
University of Notre Dame. Pembroke 25 is a collection of
Anglo-Latin homilies, copied at the scriptorium at Bury St.
Edmunds in the late eleventh or early twelfth century by a scribe
– or perhaps two scribes – who used the round English Caroline
minuscule common there rather than the more pointed Norman
Caroline minuscule that came to prominence in England in the
period immediately following the Norman Conquest. Following
the disillusionment of Bury St. Edmunds in 1538, Pembroke
25 disappeared for a time, but it was given to Pembroke College,
Cambridge, at the end of the sixteenth century, and it still lives
in that library today. It has been well maintained, it is not
damaged, and the script is clear and easy to decipher.
For an edition of this sort, a single text from a single manuscript,
the encoding requirements are relatively simple. This
manuscript is purely textual, not illustrated or illuminated in
any way, but we are noting all abbreviations and distinctive
paleographical aspects in the manuscript (including scribal
emendations), as well as marginalia. The TEI Header contains
some descriptive information, notably a descriptive list of all
abbreviation types that are linked to the individual abbreviations
throughout the project. We are using the EPPT for the
text-image linking in this project, and I will give a brief
demonstration of the project as it stands at the time of the
conference.
The Electronic Aelfric , directed by Aaron Kleist at Biola
University and developed by a large group of collaborators,
seeks to edit eight Old English homilies by Ælfric of Eynsham,
who was arguably the most educated and prolific writer of tenth
century England. These homilies cover the period from Easter
to Pentecost, and trace their development through six phases
of authorial revision and then through nearly 200 years of
transmission following Ælfric’s death: twenty-four sets of
readings or strands of textual tradition found in twenty-eight
manuscripts produced in at least five scriptoria between 990
and 1200.
The contrast between the Electronic Aelfric and Pembroke 25
is great: while Pembroke 25 is one manuscript, the Electronic
Aelfric draws from twenty-eight manuscripts. Although no
single homily out of the eight occurs in more than ten of these
manuscripts, it is still a great number of textual variants to deal
with. In addition to the text, the project also needs to address
the individual manuscripts – six of which are from the infamous
Cotton Collection (now housed in the British Library), damaged
by fire in 1731. Those manuscripts that are not damaged still
have singularities, such as marginalia, that we also wish to
encode and link to image. We are using the EPPT for this
project, partnered with the TEI Apparatus tags, to bring together
the text and images of several different manuscripts. I will show
examples of corresponding manuscript pages, as well as sample
code illustrating multiple variants partnered with image-text
linking. 1. Edition Production and Presentation Technology (EPPT),
developed by Kevin Kiernan under the aegis of the Electronic
Boethius project, <http://www.eppt.org/eppt-tr
ial/EPPT-TrialProjects.htm>
Image processing services, developed by Neel Smith and
Christopher Blackwell through Harvard's Center for Hellenic
Studies, at Digital incunabula: a CHS site devoted to the
cultivation of digital arts and letters, <http://chs75.ha
rvard.edu/projects/diginc/techpub/image
s>
Juxta, developed through the NINES project (networked
infrastructure for nineteenth-century electronic scholarship), <h
ttp://www.nines.org/tools/juxta.html>
Florian Thienel, “Konzept für einen editionsphilologischen
EDV-Arbeitsplatz auf der Basis von XML und verwandten
Standards” Diplomarbeit im Fach Informatik, Universität
Würzburg
2. UVic Image Markup Tool (1.3.0.3), <http://www.tapor
.uvic.ca/~mholmes/image_markup/>
3. Doug Reside at the Maryland Institute of Technology in the
Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland is developing
still-unnamed tool to tag not only images, but video and audio
files as well
Bibliography
Carlquist, Jonas. ""Medieval Manuscripts, Hypertext and
Reading. Visions of Digital Editions." Literary & Linguistic
Computing 19.1 (2004): 105-118.
Cross, James E. Cambridge Pembroke College MS. 25: A
Carolingian Sermonary Used by Anglo-Saxon Preachers.
King’s College London Medieval Studies, 1. London: King's
College, 1987.
Dué, Casey, and Mary Ebbott . "As Many Homers As You
Please: an On-line Multitext of Homer." Classics @ (2004).
<http://classics.furman.edu/classicsAt2/d
ue-ebbott_2004_all.html>
Godden, Malcolm. Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies: Introduction,
Commentary and Glossary. New York: Published for the Early
English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 2000.
Kiernan, Kevin. "Digital Facsimiles in Editing: Some
Guidelines for Editors of Image-based Scholarly Editions."
Electronic Textual Editing. Ed. Lou Burnard, , Katherine
O’Brien O’Keeffe and John Unsworth. New York: Modern
Language Association, 2005. preprint at <http://www.te
i-c.org/Activities/ETE/Preview/kiernan.xm
l>
Kiernan, Kevin, Jerzy W. Jaromczyk, Alex Dekhtyar, and
Dorothy Carr Porter. "The ARCHway Project: Architecture for
Research in Computing for Humanities through Research,
Teaching, and Learning." Literary & Linguistic Computing 20
(Suppl 1) (2005): 69-88. doi:10.1093/llc/fqi018
Kiernan, Kevin, W. Brent Seales, and James Griffioen. "The
Reappearances of St. Basil the Great in British Library MS
Cotton Otho B. x." Computers and the Humanities 36.1 (2002):
7-26.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. "Editor's Introduction: Image-based
Humanities Computing." Computers and the Humanities 36.1
(2002): 3-6.
Lecolinet, Eric, Laurent Robert, and Francois Role. "Text-image
Coupling for Editing Literary Sources." Computers and the
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