SMART-GS Project: a tool searching, marking up and linking historical documents

1. SMART-GS Project: a toolsearching, marking up and linking historical documents Susumu Hayashi, Kazuaki Kobayashi*), Kazuhiro Kobayashi, Yuuta Hashimoto, Tsukushi Shimizu, Yuuki Tamura, Humanistic Informatics, Kyoto University Kengo Teraswa, Hajime Imura Meme Media Laboratory, Hokkaido University *) present address: Goldman Sachs Japan Holdings, Ltd. Technology Division

2. Book pages annotated by underlines & marginal notes, etc. Underline Bookmark by PostIt Flag Marginal note

3. Linked annotations: relationship of annotations A region marked up by the brace Brace A line linking the region and the note Marginal note

4. Annotations for historical documents My text analysis of the diary of 19-20th century German Mathematician David Hilbert, who is said the father of 20th century mathematics.

5. What are we doing? • Annotating images of book pages and historical documents by • adding markups, bookmarks and texts (e.g. marginal notes) • relating them each other by links • and, further relating them to resources outside: books, papers & Web resources, e.g. references to papers , books and documents in archives.

6. For the cases of Web and PDF documents… • Cyber documents, e.g. PDF files and HTML files, can be digitally annotated in similar ways. • Furthermore, words in such digital documents are searchable. • Imagine that historical documents can be digitally annotated and are searchable. Examples of such documents: • handwriting documents, e.g. Hilbert’s diary. • Image-base digital archives of books, journals and other documents, now widely available on Web thanks to some libraries…

7. An example of image-base digital archives • 国立国会図書館近代デジタルライブラリー　(National Diet Library, Digital library from the Meiji Era) • 143,000 books from Meiji and Taisyo eras are open to the public. From NDL, Digital library from the Meiji Era; Y. Fukuzawa, Gakushya Anshin-ron

8. The goal of SMART-GS project • Providingplatforms for marking up, linking and searching historical documents on PC and on the network. • Looks as a dream? • No, it’s not a dream! • We have already built a JAVA application SMART-GS with the full functions required except the network features.

9. Demo of SMART-GS applied to David Hilbert’s diary • The document: The first book of D. Hilbert’s diary: German handwritings from 1885-1892. • Searching a word in the diary • The word searched is “Kronecker” another German mathematician’s family name. • Marking up and linking images and texts • One-to-Many Link • SMART-GS used in real researches • my research on the diary • Kazuhiro Kobayashi’s graduation research

10. Working with SMART-GS onthree wide monitors A snapshot of my desktop. SMART-GS, an online digital archive, wikipedia, and a digital version of early 20th century dictionary

11. Towards tools on the Net • Historians with similar interests are often scattered through the globe. They wish to share knowledge for every-day researches, but it is not so easy. • SMART-GS technology will provide an excellent help for world-wide collaborations of a team of historians. • It may also provide a dramatic improvement on image-base online digital archives of handwritten and/or printed historical documents. • The key of such network version is the way the annotation was attached to images of historical documents: Gs-file!

12. Gs-file: an XML file storing annotations and others Annotations are converted into the XML-format and stored in gs-file = + Document image

13. Inside of a gs-file

14. Different gs-files provide different views on the same historical text

15. Solid line is annotating and looking at Broken line is just looking at A model of network version-archive model- historian Archive Annotation by gs-file Gs-file Annotation by gs-file Images historian • Historian publish their own gs-files to annotate document images in a public archive. • They can annotate also gs-files of other historians. Gs-file reader A reader can browse views of historians, if a historian makes his view open to the public.

16. Future network version can markup digital archives

17. Another model of a network version-online collaboration model- • Historian publish their own document images and gs-files (views). They comment to views of other researchers. Images+gs-file historian historian Images+gs-file historian Images+gs-file reader

18. Conclusion • SMART-GS system has been already applied to a study of a very important diary in the history of mathematics and proved its usefulness. • There is also a plan to use SMART-GS in a project to transcribe a gigantic diary of Yuuzaburo Kuratomi (1853-1948), a chairman of the privy council. • The network versions in the future will be useful for research collaborations and using digital archives.

19. Conclusion (continued) • For technical and financial reasons, historians must often use secondary sources rather than primary sources. However, the secondary sources are products of “interpretations” of their authors! • SMART-GS technology together with online digital archives will provide historians with an easy and reasonable way to use primary sources for their studies.