Digitally Enabled Scholarship with Medieval Manuscripts Michael Appleby Yale Digital Collections Center (YDC2) March 1, 2013

A Collaborative Approach to Digital Manuscript Studies The project is a collaboration between Yale and Stanford The project is funded by two grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, $1.65M in total –Yale: Digitally Enabled Scholarship with Medieval Manuscripts –Stanford: Interoperability for Medieval Manuscripts – Phase II Yale and Stanford applied for funding with explicit dependencies between the two projects Core software Local implementation of software to support

Yale Digital Humanities Projects The grant supports four projects led by Yale faculty All projects will use digital tools to enable the use of manuscripts from multiple repositories Three projects will employ advanced digital imaging or image analysis techniques

Yale Digital Humanities Projects Jessica BrantleyJessica Brantley: A study of variations in textual and visual elements in copies of English Books of Hours Holly RushmeierHolly Rushmeier: The development of an image analysis tool for the purpose of “comparison” of medieval manuscripts Beinecke MS 310, 1r

Yale Digital Humanities Projects Alastair MinnisAlastair Minnis: An analysis of inks and pigments used in hand-produced copies of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and other contemporaneous Middle English works Osborn fa1, 53r, visible and infrared lighting

Yale Digital Humanities Projects Anders Winroth:Anders Winroth: The preparation of a new edition of Gratian's Decretum, the first scholastic canon law textbook produced in the Middle Ages. Cologne, Erzbischfliche Dizesan- und Dombibliothek 128 Kb

Shared Needs Access to a substantial corpus of digitized manuscripts for both viewing and computational analysis Comparative viewing of manuscripts drawn from different repositories Annotation of the manuscripts with text, transcription, images, data sets, and semantic tags

Creating an Interoperable Environment for Digital Manuscript Studies Adopt or develop standards for interoperation between repositories and tools –Image Delivery International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) –Publication of manuscript structural data Shared Canvas –Annotations Open Annotation Collaboration (W3C)

Image Delivery - IIIF Provides image access and manipulation capabilities, including crop, scale, zoom, and rotate

Publication – Shared Canvas Provides a data model capable of expressing the complex structure of manuscript materials SharedCanvas: A Collaborative Model for Medieval Manuscript Layout DisseminationSharedCanvas: A Collaborative Model for Medieval Manuscript Layout Dissemination, R. Sanderson and B. Albritton

Annotations Open Annotation Collaboration data model –Associates annotations with digital objects –Content agnostic

Standards Lead to Tools in an Interoperable Environment Manuscript and annotation viewer –Currently in –Support multi-up viewing of manuscripts –Load manuscripts and annotations from any interoperable repository Annotation server –A public annotation server will be developed by Stanford –A local annotation server will be deployed at Yale Project-specific annotation –Based on Blacklight Yale infrastructure –An IIIF Image service has been created for images hosted at Yale

Interoperable Tools Existing tools for digital manuscript studies are adopting the Shared Canvas and Open Annotation standards T-PEN: Transcription for Paleographical and Editorial Louis University Digital Mappaemundi University Beinecke MS 10, 1r viewed in DM

Yale Infrastructure Pre-existing digital infrastructure helped make the grant possible YDC2 content platform for cultural heritage –Media Manager –Content Delivery Service –Metadata Management Extend the use of these tools to cultural heritage content

Outcomes Evidence-based manuscript analysis –Scientific imaging –Side-by-side comparison of manuscripts from different repositories Collaboration across multiple communities in a shared environment Sustainable approach to digital humanities –Standards-based –Shared infrastructure

Questions? YDC2 Project Web SiteProject Web Site