remoteness and connectedness in the library world
TRANSCRIPT
Remoteness and Connectedness in the Library World.
Alice Crawford
What are the Digital Humanities?
• the area of study concerned with the intersection of Computing and the Humanities disciplines
• focus on the digitization and analysis of materials related to the established Humanities subject areas
• combine traditional study methodologies in these areas with Computing tools such as data visualisation, information retrieval, data mining, computational analysis and digital publishing.
Digitisation projects help to connect readers with documents buried in Special Collections strong-rooms.
There are connections between old and new…
Chronique de Reims, Manuscript 432 from the Parker Library online
Supported by multiple new technologies:• Lucene search engine (search & browse functions)• Struts framework (http:strutts.apache.org/)• JavaServer pages, and Java tag libraries (results summary
pages)• Saxon XSLT processor (long MSS descriptions)• Aware SDK (decodes images)• Custom-built Java applications (page-turn view and single-
page inspect view)• Linux server environment running a single Tomcat instance
(hosted).
Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts British Library MS Egerton 3038
Supported by:• XML (Extensible Markup Language)• TEI (Text-Encoding Initiative• Adobe Photoshop (image processing)• Zoomify (making images zoomable & interactive)• METS (Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard)
& ImageMagick & ExifTool (metadata from images)• Apache Solr and Ajax Solr (search function)• Django (transcription tool)
Making connections within the digital pages…
Biographical Register Project
Photopoetry Books project
• Sometimes there’s a real connection with the content of the documents…
• C.S. Catty, Journal of a tour through Scotland, June 1856.
