Tue 5 Jun, 14:00-15:30
Session 18: Visualities 2
Examples of Images in Text Encoding
Dorothy Carr Porter
Re-imag[en]ing Cervantes’ Don Quixote: a Multilayered Approach to Editing Visual Materials in a Hypertextual Archive
Eduardo Urbina, Fernando González Moreno, Richard Furuta, Steven E. Smith, Jie Deng, Stephanie Elmquist, and Sarah Tonner
The Visionary Cross: An Experiment in the Multimedia Edition
Daniel Paul O’Donnell, Catherine Karkov, James Graham, Wendy Osborn, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco
D. Porter began with what she termed the “steady growth” of image-based editing, from a 2002 article in Computers in the Humanities to this year’s training session at the Int’l Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo. [May’ve missed some things because I’m translating a bit from her slides as I type.]
Tools for… linking text and image: options include Edition Production and Presentation Technology (EPPT), developed by Kevin Kiernan for the Electronic Boethius project; image processing services developed through Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies; Juxta, developed through NINES. Img annotation: Image Markup Tool (UVic); PLINY (KCL). Multimedia annotation: Ajax XML Encoder or AXE (MITH; see also).
Taxonomy of image-based editing—annotation may be image-centric, including 3D objects or models thereof, or video (adds in issue of time); it may be text-centric, whereby an image of part of a text is linked to an encoded transcription; multiple img sources might exist, or one might be linking an image of a MS witness to part of a text, and the segments don’t correspond 100% due to a lacuna. . . . Consider how an illustration on a page informs a text, or how a program of illustration throughout a text influences MS mise-en-page. We need more communication across time and space (geography, disciplines, eras of study) and a centralized listing of all image-based projects and tools.
Project #1: Pembroke 25, “the simple one”—single witness, not illustrated; NEH-funded; homiliary written at Bury St Edmunds, s. xi late, containing 96 Latin sermons originally written on the Continent during the ninth century; sixty of the 96 remain unpublished, and the MS hasn’t received rigorous palaeographical or codicological analysis. One thing Porter appreciates about this MS is that it has many abbreviations, and they’re done in different ways. [Some scribes standardize their use of abbreviating glyphs.]
Project #2, Electronic Ælfric, “the complex one”—doing only eight homilies (15-22) because so many witnesses exist, and because those eight alone appear to have been reproduced through all six phases of production. [We saw images of both.]
Porter also touched upon a Harvard project on Marciana Library Venetus A (Homer) and Benjamin Withers’s work on the OE Hexateuch.
[On balance Porter did a great job bridging complex medieval material for a humcomp-savvy but not manuscript-aware audience, but I would’ve liked her to have discussed more specifics.]
Project site link. R. Furuta described the collection: 705 editions total, early C17 to present, plus two C16 texts referenced in the text; the largest portion is English, Spanish, and French illustrated editions of C18/19. 237 editions have been digitized, with 11,207 images available online; each month, images from about twenty editions are digitized and added to the digital repository.
An art historian adds descriptive md, scholarly commentary, and hypertextual connections. The descriptive md includes info about the editions and individual illustrations (physical size, e.g.); the commentary includes the illustrations’ narrative content, their aesthetic and hermeneutic significance, info on the artists and engravers, and comments on their artistic practice.
[I stopped taking notes to go and play with the site.]
Porter also substitute-presented for D. O’Donnell. The visionary cross matrix includes the Ruthwell, Bewcastle, and Brussels crosses, as well as Dream of the Rood and Elene in the Vercelli Book. The Ruthwell Cross’s current situation (in a four-foot pit and near a wall) means inter alia that photographs have failed to show the relationship of parts of its carvings. O’Donnell et alia are working on an edition that combines the related aspects of all five “objects”—three inscription-based, two in manuscript. The groundbreaking aspect is not to edit all five but to deal directly with their interrelationships.
Repurposing takes a large part in this project, with the idea of allowing Anglo-Saxonists, archaeologists, and others to build upon the materials for their own work. Anticipatory linking will be used, as one might on a wiki, to help publicize work in progress.