Conference: Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come

A three day conference will be hosted at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville on March 26-28, 2010. The conference will deal with the sustainability issues regarding online humanities projects and research. Nine scholars will be presenting with eighteen responding. The site has a resources page of recent scholarly articles and links to major Digital Humanities projects.

TILE Grant for linking information with a particular image

This project out of the Indiana University's School of Library and Information Science has the potential to change art and images research. Professor John Walsh will be collaborating with MITH and DHO to create a new tool called TILE (Text-Image Linking Environment).

From the original article:

"We're all working together to develop an advanced suite of tools for linking texts and images, and developing image-based digital humanities resources," said Walsh, who is also director of SLIS's Digital Library Specializations program. "Despite the proliferation of image-based editions and archives, the linking of images and textual information remains a slow and frustrating process for editors and curators."

...over the next two years they will develop a new Web-based image markup tool that will, among other things, allow symbols, shapes and labels to be displayed as overlays on a base image -- like a detail of a Sistine Chapel fresco -- that then provide links to extensive annotations stored in a searchable database. The team sees TILE as the next generation of technical infrastructure supporting image-based editions and electronic archives within the humanities.

"Digital environments and tools offer possibilities for new representations of texts, new readings, and new strategies and habits of reading as documents evolve from more or less static and fixed texts to fluid and malleable data," Walsh said. "We want to develop a new Web-based, modular, collaborative image markup tool for both manual and semi-automated linking between encoded text and images of text, along with image annotation."

..."TILE will provide scholars from a diversity of disciplines with tools for the digital examination and analysis of documents, particularly visually and graphically rich documents such as illuminated manuscripts, art books, illustrated children's books, comics and graphic novels, maps," Walsh said.

SHANTI at the University of Virginia

SHANTI, Sciences, Humanities and the Arts Network of Technological Initiatives, is a set of software tools designed for digital scholarship.

From the news release:

"The new suite of software available through SHANTI will serve the most requested needs:

• WordPress for Web site creation and blogging;
• Confluence Wiki for collaborative creation of shared documents;
• Kaltura for managing, editing and presenting audio, video and photos;
• Zotero for creating and sharing bibliographic data, including the documents and Web pages themselves;
• NowComment for collaborative close reading and annotation of texts.

Much of this software is open-source, and some is free, Germano noted. SHANTI is acquiring site licenses as needed (for Confluence and Kaltura), and providing an enhanced version of WordPress, called WordPress Multiuser, along with BuddyPress....

"Beyond the five "core" applications intended for the most widespread use, SHANTI is also offering Drupal for rapid development of scholarly archives and exhibits that organize and connect a wide variety of media and data, and VisualEyes for easy creative visualization of diverse data such as maps, graphs, statistics, images and timelines."

Internet Archive Receives NSF grant to add Search and Extraction Features to One Million Books

The Internet Archive, The Center for Intelligent Retrieval and the Perseus Digital Library received 2.7 million dollars from the National Science Foundation to investigate 'large-scale information extraction and retrieval technologies for digitized book collection.'