Walter J. Ong S.J. Center for Digital Humanities
The world of annotations is one of unstructured targeting. There is an existing piece of data somewhere in the world and an annotation targets it. At a higher level we work with data objects called Manifest. The manifests we work with follow the construct created by the IIIF frame work (https://iiif.io/api/presentation/2.1/#manifest). An important attribute of […]
As IIIF Manifests increasingly contain transcription annotations, the tools that are able to handle these documents must also treat text content as a first-class citizen. In our TPEN software, users regularly generate new annotations with text content that is included in the manifest documents made available for every project. In addition, TPEN allows for the […]
Recently, two events coincided that inspired me to pull this code back out and take a second look at the process. The first is that our center charged a group of Computer Science majors with improving the effectiveness of our image processing algorithm as part of their senior capstone project; the second was the seemingly sudden burst of HTR promises, which depend on some level of layout analysis to work. In both cases, I was struck that improvements were accomplished in all cases with more processing power and additional layers of analysis.
Does not compute Using an “old” iPad on a plane to review transcription data was a clarifying task. For all the advances in research technologies, even simple tasks, such as viewing manuscript images on an institution’s website can crash a five year old browser, effectively rendering it inaccessible. I am not willing to accept that […]
Come one, come all. What is this Rerum of which we Tweet? Rerum is an open and free repository for all sorts of digital things. Digital anchors for real world objects and encoded assertions from real world people are stored without prejudice. It’s a data ecosystem to bring those unique digital solutions to scholarly demands […]
As developers in the field we want to follow the standards emerging for the web and for data. For the challenges our field faces, we often combine RESTful API practices, CORS, Web Annotation, Web Components, IIIF, JSON, JSON-LD, and Linked Open Data standards together so that APIs and applications we create are automatically applicable to […]
Open Data is supposed to be accessible without any constraints to availability. The idea of authentication around Open Data is an oxymoron, but in practice we have found great benefit for keeping track of who can claim ownership to an object and how we can use ownership to put natural restrictions on the openness of […]
Any new web service or application must take a considered look at authorization, authentication, and attribution—authorization, to make changes to data; authentication, to ensure those making changes are known; and attribution, to apply proper credit for contributions. The prevailing practice is to authenticate users within applications and using appropriate context to make attributions. Popular transcription […]
In the last post, we explored how the tree of the version history is healed around a deleted object. In this post, we look more directly at the transformations to the deleted object itself. Let’s take the same abbreviated object to begin: The Case for Breadcrumbs Because we are removing it from the versioning, the […]
At the Walter J. Ong, S.J. Center for Digital Humanities, we have been working hard on RERUM, the public object repository for IIIF, Web Annotation, and other JSON documents. The latest feature we’ve been diving into for the 1.0 release is DELETE. As is covered in the documentation on Github, there are a few guiding […]