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.