Image Markup Tool
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Inserito il 11/09/2008
Image
Markup Tool by M. Holmes
(http://www.tapor.uvic.ca/~mholmes/image_markup/index.php) together with
the TEI P5 <facsimile> element to markup areas of the Vercelli Book
manuscript images to the corresponding transcription in XML format. From
the beginning, I thought about two distinct ways to link text and image:
1. hot-spot functionality: define specific areas of the folio (decorated
initials, marginalia, erasures and corrections, etc.) to be linked to
explanatory text (such as paleographical and editorial notes);
2. direct image-transcription linking: define every line in the
manuscript as an area linked to the corresponding text of the
transcription; the idea being that clicking on a line in the ms image
would take you to the corresponding text line, and viceversa.
While I have little concerns about 1 and will surely proceed as
intended, I'm having second thoughts about 2, especially after giving a
paper at a conference in Pavia (Medieval Texts-Contemporary Media: The
Art and Science of Editing in the Digital Age
http://lettere.unipv.it/?pagina=p&titolo=MedievalTexts) on this very
subject and discussing it a little with other participants afterwards. I
wonder which approach is best on usability grounds:
1. linking line to line as originally planned: the disadvantage being
that, moving forward while browsing the images or the transcription
text, the connection between the two would be lost, (status disruption,
a possibly cause of uncertainty for the user);
2. synchronising text and image in a permanent way: navigating the
images would have the transcription text scrolling accordingly, and
viceversa; the alignment would be guaranteed, but could be a little
heavy on resources perhaps (alignment might be disabled an re-enabled
though);
3. giving up on a line to line alignment for a simpler page to page
linking: surely less flexible, would require less encoding and less
resources.
