Digital Atheneum Project University of Kentucky New Approaches to Restoring, Editing and Searching humanities collections. by Arpita Goenka

Principal investigators Brent Seales James Griffioen Kevin Kernian

Introduction  It is developing new methods to restore and make accessible previously lost writings  Focuses on recovering the manuscripts of the famous Cottonian Library Collection in the British Library.  Many of the manuscripts badly damaged by 1731 fire and further deteriorated due to neglect, misuse and other conservation methods.  Even with the best digitization techniques the remaining of the text is difficult or impossible to decipher.  With damaged manuscripts the search engine must be devised to accommodate partial and distorted forms.

Project focus  New digitization techniques to illuminate all possible information from the original manuscript.  Restoration algorithms to attempt to fill in the most likely missing information  Complex, data-specific, content search techniques to identify the imperfect representations found in severely damaged manuscripts.

Using Illumination to Enhance Digitization  The images must be obtained using extremely high- resolution cameras  Many parts of the damaged documents are invisible without special lighting techniques  The manuscripts are rarely completely flat or planar.

Illumination Technique using ultraviolet lighting to reveal formerly invisible text

Limitation of 2-D imagery  When imaging a non-planar object-it can appear warped or crinkled.  Difficult to disambiguate if warping is part of original or an artifact of the object’s shape.  Provides insufficient look and feel  Items such as wax seals, coins, etc have inherent 3- D shape

3-D Acquisition setup  Introduce a light projector along with the camera to capture 3-D models.  Projector and camera are used to triangulate 3D points on the artifact’s surface xyz

Depth Information  Depth information may also help solve the problem of accurately reuniting physically separate fragments

Searching Images with Computational Methods  Creating document specific image processing algorithms that can locate, identify and classify individual letterforms.  By analyzing several letterforms, computer models are built that can perform probabilistic pattern matching of damaged letterforms.  Transcriptions aid significantly in searching by narrowing the search space and assisting an editor who is struggling to decipher a charred leaf.

Editing and Annotating the Damaged manuscripts  Encoding the transcripts and edited texts in SGML to facilitate comprehensive searches,and are converting both to HTML or XML so they can be displayed by Internet browsers.  Developing a generic toolkit to assist other editors (like scholars in humanities) in assembling complex editions from high-resolution digital manuscript data.  An editor can then collect and create the components of an electronic edition for any work and use the generic toolkit to fashion a sophisticated interface for an electronic display of the edition.

Editor’s Tool  It must be Flexible: encompass many different collections  Usable: support non-expert computer users  Technically sophisticated: incorporate new technical solutions Functions include Registration, Mosaicing,Textual correspondence, Glossary contsruction

Refernces  "The Digital Atheneum - Restoring Damaged Manuscripts." RLG DigiNews 3:6 "The Digital Atheneum - Restoring Damaged Manuscripts."  "The Digital Atheneum: New Technologies for Restoring and Preserving Old Documents." Computers in Libraries 20:2 (February 2000), "The Digital Atheneum: New Technologies for Restoring and Preserving Old Documents."  "The Digital Atheneum: New Approaches for Preserving, Restoring and Analyzing Damaged Manuscripts." Proceedings of the First ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, (NY: ACM Press, 2001), 