Pantagruelion

Wired: Cloudline: “In bringing the Dead Sea Scrolls into the cloud via an interface so user-friendly that even a humanities professor can navigate it, Google has once again played a part in something wonderful for the world. .… Even ambitious modern attempts to build advanced tools for the humanities—and here I’m thinking specifically of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the Perseus Project rest quite directly on foundations laid one or two hundred years ago…. The worst problem with modern textual scholarship isn’t in the tools themselves—rather, it’s in the transcriptions on which the updates to the aforementioned tools are based…. But what’s even rarer is the opportunity to compare a high-quality image of a source text to the transliteration and/or transcription that underlies the critical edition. (A transliteration is where a scholar tries to copy the source text exactly, misspellings and all; a transcription is a cleaned up version of the transliteration, where spelling, punctuation, diacriticals, and the like are all normalized.) Transcriptions and transliterations are almost never released; all scholars see is the resulting, cleaned-up edition. …

“The only way forward out of this mess is to proceed in two phases, the first of which is to bring primary sources themselves online in a way that gives scholars easy and totally open access to high-resolution, multi-spectral images.… More recently, for instance, there’s The Rare Book Room, a digital archiving labor that now includes some 400 manuscripts photographed at resolutions as high as 200MB per page…. The second phase—and this is critical—is to offer some kind of open mechanism for letting scholars (and later, the interested public) attach metadata and conversation to the different layers (raw image, color-corrected image, multi-spectral image, transliteration, transcription) of the online text. The main tool that I’m aware of that’s explicitly designed to enable a community to mark up a document in something like the manner that will be needed is Bobby Fishkin’s ReframeIt, but there may be others that work similarly….