[Mediaevistik] Help evaluate a new digital tool for manuscript studies

Bettina Wagner Bettina.Wagner at bsb-muenchen.de
Fr Aug 27 18:17:42 CEST 2010


   1. Help evaluate a new digital tool for manuscript studies
      (James Ginther)


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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 06:42:41 -0500
From: James Ginther <ginthej at slu.edu>
Subject: [dm-l] Help evaluate a new digital tool for manuscript
	studies
To: dm-l at uleth.ca 
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	<AANLkTikN_jb_YYqiyK8YnFudafpzOen9XwNYoExNeDSd at mail.gmail.com>
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Dear fellow medievalists:



I am writing to ask for your help.  Over the last year, the Center for
Digital Theology at Saint Louis University has been prototyping a
transcription tool for digitized manuscripts.  Part of that process includes
an application that identifies the location of the lines on a given
manuscript page.  We have been testing this on a variety of limited
datasets, but for the last two months we have focused our testing on the
complete collection of digitized manuscripts that comprise the Parker on the
Web <http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/> collection.



Part of the development has included spot checking the results, where a user
will display individual images and check the attempted line parsing.  There
are some 196,000 images in the Parker Collection and so it has not been
possible to check every one.  While this is a substantial number, there are
only 500 manuscripts in the collection. To ensure we have evaluated a number
of pages from each manuscript, we have gone through four iterations during
this grant period already and our small team has been able to check as many
as 2,000 images in one iteration.



We would now like to open this up to the larger public for a limited period
of time. We are asking you to go to
http://manuscripts.no-ip.org/Paleography_Web/. There you can create a user
name and password and check as many manuscript images as you like (and you
can return to your session later using that same username/password).  Those
images are from the Parker collection, but have had colored lines
superimposed on them to indicate where our application thinks it is has
found lines. You would be asked to judge the quality of the line parsing
(good, close, bad, disaster, etc), based on some basic guidelines
provided. Taking a cue from projects like *Galaxy Zoo*, there will be a
leader board indicating how many images each user has evaluated.  No prizes
for being first, though, other than the admiration of the digital humanist
community--and our thanks!



This "crowd sourcing QA" will open up to the general public on August 26,
2010 and will be closed on August 30, 2010.  We do not require any personal
information.  Usernames will be retained to identify which user evaluated
which image.



We believe that this could be a very useful tool, and the more feedback we
can get at this early stage, the better the tool will be in the end.



Please contact me if you have any questions.



This project is being funded an award from the President*ÇÖs Research Fund,
Saint Louis University.  The prototype line parser was first developed
during a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  The Center thanks both
funding bodies for their support of this kind of research.



All images displayed are owned by the Matthew Parker Library, Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge.

** 2009 Masters of Corpus Christi College.

Images used with permission.

No one may duplicate any image (in digital or printed format; or store on an
electronic device) without the express permission of the Masters of Corpus
Christi College.





James Ginther

Project Director

-- 
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James R. Ginther, PhD
Assoc. Professor of Medieval Theology
& Co-Director,
Center for Digital Theology
Saint Louis University
-------------------------
ginthej at slu.edu 
http://theology.slu.edu 


" Blessed are the Geeks for they shall encode the Earth"

"...debet esse oratio devota, ne mens sit in foro dum os psallit in choro."
- Robert Grosseteste

"Being bored is the only time you are creative." -Freeman Dyson
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