Hi @alexmendes @mia and @christian. Have finally logged in - I thought I had a LibCrowds account, but didn't. Iam now @MarineLives
MarineLives & Signs of Literacy (our new community to study historical literacy: http://signsofliteracy.org/) is doing some serious thinking about creating IIIF manifests to display markes, initials and signatures contained in manuscript pages. The functionality we are interested in is to be able to display text areas (or image areas) within a manuscript image and/or its matching full text transcription which contain relevant markes, initials and signatures, as well as to display the whole image page or whole matching full text transcription page. We want to be able to create IIIF manifests, which will pull up relevant markes, initials and signatures from multiple institutions with IIIF servers and content. For example the British Library and the Stadsarchief Amsterdam.
We are thinking how to semantically annotate or tag the images or text pages, and the specific image or text regions within the whole pages, so that manifests can be created.
The sort of tags or annotations we are thinking of are simple
e.g. Occupation [wine cooper; mariner; shipwright]
e.g. Type of signoff [marke; initial(s); signature]
e.g. Place of residence [e.g. Wapping; Cadiz]
e.g. Date of signoff [e.g. March 13th, 1629]
A specific signoff (marke, initial or signature) could have multiple tages, e.g. Text reading "Jo Bloggs, mariner, living in Wapping, aged 23" in a deposition dated March 13th 1629 could be tagged
- mariner; Wapping; age 23; 1629
Our application envisages dealing with tens of thousands of legal records from the English High Court of Admiralty (TNA) and the Amsterdam notarial archives (Stadsarchief Amsterdam). Probably a minimum of 50,000 images, but could be many more.
We want to be able to crowdsource the tagging of the signoffs, having used Transkribus (or some other technology) to create an XML pixel level map of where the signoff is on the page of the manuscript.
Prior to crowdsourcing this tagging, we would want to take all the admiralty court and notarial images and upload them to one or more IIIF servers.
That's how far we have got. I have had an initial discussion with Digirati about this, but have parked the discussion for the moment, lacking funding. I will be giving a paper at the IIIF Washington DC conference, May 21-25th, at which I will be laying out a vision for greater integration of IIIF and Transkribus ecosystems, and making a pitch for the development of the above functionality I have described.
I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this, and to see what sort of design solutions you come up with. I also have some interest from the Technical Director of Pelagios/Recogito, Rainer Simon at the Austrian Institute of Technology, for this sort of functionality.
Best wishes, Colin