Category: Software and Tools

Monasterium

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The virtual archive Monasterium is the largest archive for medieval documents, containing more than 250 000 documents (as of Apr. 2012), as plain text, image or both.

History

The project Monasterium took off in the Austrian province of Lower Austria, which is rich in monasteries. From their founding in the high Middle Ages, these monasteries have stood without interruption, so that this region can boast an unbroken archival tradition. As a result of their great historical meaning, these archives guard the better part of the tradition and history of this country from the Middle Ages and early Modern Period. The strong historical relations between the monasteries and throughout the surrounding country establish the ideal conditions to realize the possibility of a virtual retrieval system of these broadly distributed sources. Spreading out from the St. Pölten episcopal archive, work on this project began with the energetic support of government and the monasteries themselves.

From project to institution The logical consequence of the project with the Lower Austrian monasteries was reaching out to the other Austrian provinces and the countries neighboring Austria. With the support of the Austrian State Ministry for Education, Art and Culture (Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur) and the European Union, Monasterium has succeeded in finding the financial support to manage a further out-reach effort. With this, the many already existing connections between the archives could finally be merged in June 2006. The Memorandum created for this has since then presented the underlying basis for collaboration in the Consortium. However, the Consortium did not intend to stand on this document permanently, and has striven to further develop itself. This lead to the November 2007 creation of a basic declaration of intent, in which the emerging network and its connected virtual archive established a more enduring common union in ICARus (International Centre for Archival Research).

Content and originality

The virtual archive Monasterium contains more than 250 000 documents (as of Apr. 2012) from more than 98 European archives. The documents are organized in 540 archival fonds and research collections. The content of the virtual archive depends on the decisions of the participants. It can vary from archive to archive, from collection to collection. Each document (mostly charters) have at least minimal metadata such as shelf mark and date and abstract. Each institution can download on Monasterium’s servers:

  • digitized images (387 000 images as of Apr. 2012, since more than one image can be related to one document)
  • full text (22 000 charters)

This platform specific features are:

  • Technical
    • Mutualized infrastructure and development for many institutions,
    • Hosting of digital images
    • Long-term preservation
  • Scientific
    • Collaboration & crowdsourcing
    • Scientific moderation through qualified experts
  • Administrative
    • Large scale visibility of local and small archives
    • Free of charge for participating institutions

The development is done at the University of Cologne for ICARUS (International Centre for Archival Research), which gathers more than 130 members in 25 countries in Europe and the Canada.

Crowdsourcing tool

Users have the possibility to transcribe the documents and to correct the plain text or descriptions. The system is moderated (expert users have to review the transcriptions before the publication) The editing tool currently is migrating from Java to Ajax (Apr. 2012).

The software behind the platform (the “Monasterium Collaborative Archive” MOM-CA) is open source. You can find the documentation at [1].

Source(s): Crowdsourcing tool

EPT (Edition Production Technology)

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A software suite based on Eclipse under development by the Electronic Boethius project. EPT allows the creation of image based editions, where images (for example of folios) are transcribed and marked up all through a cleverly designed interface. It is especially interesting in its ability to allow overlapping markup. This allows markup of both the textual structure (pages, folios, etc.) and the textual content (lines, paragraphs, etc.) that may overlap. It does so by using a start & end milestone technique. The editor allows a large number of customisations, and since it is based on eclipse, further plugins could be developed.

A message from Dot Porter to the Digital Medievalist mailing list provides further information:

The EPT enables an editor to:

  1. Create a project by importing digital images, transcript (which can be a pre-existing XML document, or a text document with no markup), and a DTD or set of DTDs. (Details on what I mean by “set of DTDs” – not TEI tagsets! – can be found by following the tutorial links on the demo site, see below).
  2. Insert markup into this project through user-friendly, completely configurable markup templates. In the EPT the editor views text & image side-by-side, and the markup software includes functionality for connecting pieces of text with the corresponding image sections.
  3. The full version of EPT includes additional tools for more advanced

editing – collation (tools for both types – comparing versions of the same text, and describing the structure of the physical object), statistical analysis, paleographic description, glossary development.

There are obvious start-up costs involved here – it’s not simple to get started. You’ll need to have your images and transcript (though it is possible to transcribe-as-you-go, if you import a blank text file into a new project). You’ll need to have your DTD, and if you’re concerned about overlapping markup you’ll need to divide that DTD into smaller, well-formed DTDs (the demo example projects come with such DTDs, based on TEI, which you’re welcome to use as-is and extend for your own projects). You’ll also need to do a fair amount of configuration. On top of this, you’ll need to learn to use the software, which has a fairly steep learning curve. Once the project is created and the software has been configured to suit the project, though, any editor comfortable with point-and-click technology should be able to create the electronic edition.

For a nifty article on using the EPT to help solve an editorial problem, see Kevin Kiernan’s article “The source of the Napier fragment of Alfred’s Boethius” in the inaugural issue of the Digital Medievalist journal (DOI: 10.16995/dm.7).

For the history of the EPT, and a discussion of the early aims & developments of the software and the relationship between eBo and ARCHway, see the article “The ARCHway Project: Architecture for Research in Computing for Humanities through Research, Teaching, and Learning” (Kiernan et al.), forthcoming in Literary and Linguistic Computing (abstract athttp://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/fqi018?ijkey=a2FHqg7XTTULMJz&keytype=ref – full text is available online if your library subscribes to LLC online). Note that this article is based on our presentations at ACH/ALLC 2003 so some of the specifics are out of date.

For a working demo, including text projects and tutorials for getting started with your own projects, visit http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~eft/EPPT-Demo.html

The source code for the EPT is being released in stages, corresponding with the finishing dates of the two supporting projects. The ARCHway Project finished at the end of January, and the source code for that project, the “Development EPT”, will be released very shortly. The Development EPT is a general version of the EPT. It lacks some of the editing functionality in the Stable EPT – it has the basic image-text linking, but lacks the more specialized tools described above in #3. The Development EPT is designed to be extended – if you have access to computer science support (an RA with experience coding JAVA, especially using the Eclipse development platform), you can extend the Development EPT to serve the particular needs of your individual project.

 

Further information

http://dblab.csr.uky.edu/~eiaco0/publications/DigiCULT04.html

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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