Author: takakokato

DocExplore

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Description

DocExplore is an EU INTERREG IVa project investigating the computer-based access and analysis of historical manuscripts. The project commenced on the 1st April 2009.

The aims of the project can be summarised as empowering citizens on both sides of the Channel to engage with, explore and study their cultural heritage, as embodied in written and printed documents, in meaningful, informative, accessible and entertaining ways, through the provision of transparent computer-based interactive tools. We therefore envisage developing a generic document analysis framework which provides a basic operational infrastructure and interactive toolkit.

The framework for exploring historical documents will address three strata of usage:

  • Observation tasks (e.g. in interacting with exhibits)
  • Informal information assembly, manipulation and coordination (e.g. searching documents, comparing texts, etc)
  • High-level formal textual research (automated reading tools, advanced annotations, etc)

 

Keywords

  • Disciplines: Computer Sciences, Digital editions

 

Team

  • LITIS, Université de Rouen
  • EDA, University of Kent
  • Rouen Nouvelles Bibliothèques
  • Canterbury Cathedral Archives
  • GRHIS, Université de Rouen
  • CMEMS, University of Kent

 

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BFM (Base de Français Médiéval)

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Description

The Base de Français Médiéval database (or BFM), founded in 1989, currently comprises 124 complete Old and Middle French texts. Thanks to its volume (approximately 3 300 000 words) and the diversity of the texts included, this database is unique in France for this period of the history of French. It has been used by a research community of approximately one hundred scholars, teachers, and students worldwide.

The texts included in the BFM cover a considerable geographic area and an extensive chronological breadth, with texts from the 9th century (including the first known French text, theSerments de Strasbourg) to the end of the 15th century. Both verse and prose texts are represented, as well as different genres and domains (e.g., fiction, history, hagiography, law, the sciences…).

Since May 2012, the BFM is accessible via a new web portal powered by the TXM corpus search and analysis platform. Depending on their copyright status, texts can be searched with or without context size limitation and viewed using the web browser. Non copyrighted texts can be downloaded on demand in the form of TEI P5 XML files.

All BFM texts are tokenized and morphologically tagged with the help of TreeTagger (using BFM own parameter file). As of November 2013, morphological annotation of 19 texts has been verified and corrected by experts.

Access

BFM is accessible free of charge for any interested person. Online registration and acceptance of the BFM Specific Conditions of Use are required to use some of the functionalities. Some restrictions apply to copyrighted scholarly editions included in the database. See BFM General and Specific Conditions of Use (in French) for more details.

Host Institutions

Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and ICAR Research Laboratory, Lyon, France

Contact

Alexei Lavrentiev

ASCluster (Anglo-Saxon Cluster)

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Overview

The Anglo-Saxon Cluster project aimed to explore issues in integrating disparate Anglo-Saxon sources and to bring together four existing online publications. The project builds on research carried out on four other projects involving the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at King’s College London – PASE, LangScape, eSawyer and ASChart – which collectively provide models for digitising prosopographic data, boundary clauses, charter catalogues and the diplomatic discourse of the charters themselves. It was carried out entirely at DDH and was funded by JISC.

DDH has developed a new web-based digital resource articulated around the Anglo-Saxon charters as core material, through which the data and the corresponding metadata embodied in each of the component projects have become available together in a thematic cluster. The Anglo-Saxon Cluster serves as a unified point of entry into the individual resources, allowing users to see contextually appropriate data from each project in juxtaposition and to access union indexes generated across the data in each resource. This in turn serves as a platform for exploring different approaches to cross-searching.

The aggregation of data is dynamic, taking into account the fact that the component resources will continue to be updated and evolve. The project has had a dual impact: in the development of a technical framework for the integration of disparate resources; and as a possible model for gathering textual and contextual information around medieval charters.

The project also comprises a report on challenges and potentials in integrating digital resources:

P.A. Stokes and G. Noël, ASCluster Project Report (London, 2010). http://www.ascluster.org/techinfo/index.html

Status

Completed (2009)

Project Team

  • Project Manager: Paul Spence (King’s College London)
  • Technical Research Director: Paul Vetch (KCL)
  • Technical project officers: Geoffroy Noel and Peter Stokes (KCL)

References

The Aberdeen Bestiary

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This summary has been adapted from the original website:

Introduction

The Aberdeen Bestiary (Aberdeen University Library MS 24) is considered to be one of the best examples of its type. The manuscript, written and illuminated in England around 1200, is of added interest since it contains notes, sketches and other evidence of the way it was designed and executed.

The entire manuscript has been digitised using Photo-CD technology, thus creating a surrogate, while allowing greater access to the text itself. The digitised version, offering the display of full-page images and of detailed views of illustrations and other significant features, is complemented by a series of commentaries, and a transcription and translation of the original Latin. The Project was independently evaluated.

The site can be found at the following address:

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/bestiary.hti

Digital Classicist

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http://www.digitalclassicist.org/

The Digital Classicist is a web-based hub for scholars and students interested in the application of Humanties Computing to research into the ancient world. The main purpose of the site is to offer guidelines and suggestions of major technical issues. We shall also provide reports on events, publications (print and electronic), and other developments in the field. Criteria for inclusion will be the interest and expertise of collaboraters, in general, and of the editors, in particular.

The main website contains an annotated list of classical projects that utilise computing technology, and links to freely available tools and resources of use to scholars engaging in such projects. This website will also publish stable versions of guidelines and reports from the Wiki FAQ: an interactive platform for the building of a Frequently Asked Questions list, with answers and other suggestions offered by members of the community, and collectively authored work-in-progress guidelines and reports.

We seek to encourage the growth of a community of practice, which is open to everyone interested in the topic, regardless of skill or experience in technical matters, and language of contribution. As a general principle, key sections of the website or summaries of discussions will, where possible, be translated into the major languages of European scholarship: e.g. English, French, German, and Italian.

The Digital Classicist is hosted by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London.