Digital Atheneum Project University of Kentucky

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

2. Principal investigators Brent Seales James Griffioen Kevin Kernian

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. Illumination Techniqueusing ultraviolet lighting to reveal formerly invisible text

7. 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

8. y z x 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

9. Depth Information • Depth information may also help solve the problem of accurately reuniting physically separate fragments

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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

13. Refernces • "The Digital Atheneum - Restoring Damaged Manuscripts."RLG DigiNews 3:6 • "The Digital Atheneum: New Technologies for Restoring and Preserving Old Documents."Computers in Libraries 20:2 (February 2000), 26-30. • "The Digital Atheneum: New Approaches for Preserving, Restoring and Analyzing Damaged Manuscripts." Proceedings of the First ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 2001. (NY: ACM Press, 2001), 437-443. • http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/cornellworkshop/