“Software for Humanities Computing: Image Annotation,
Unicode, and SGML packages from the Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities”
John
Unsworth
Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia
The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of
Virginia supports computer-mediated research projects in all disciplines of the
humanities. In the service of these projects, we do some software development.
In this session, John Unsworth, Director of the Institute, will demonstrate some
of the software pack-ages publicly available or under development at the
Institute. Those packages include:
Inote
: an image annotation program, written in Java. Inote allows a user to
superimpose multiple clear overlays on an image and, without altering the
underlying image, draw details (point, circle, rectangle) on those overlays and
attach annotations (text or image) to the detail. It can load images by http,
and it can be delivered, along with an annotated image, through the web. Inote
also has some special features including automatic overlay generation, in which
the software identifies lines of text in a page image and automatically creates
details for those lines. Inote will also save overlays as client-side ismap
instructions. Planned features include audio annotations and SGML awareness.
MU
: a perl-based program that will build fill-out forms for SGML editing
through the web, using a simple template of SGML tags as the basis for the form.
MU supports file-locking (for collaborative work over the net), allows one to
save and reload files as they are being edited, provides space for notes and
remarks, and automatically builds a selectable list of SGML files in
progress.
Babble
: a Unicode-based program that permits synoptic display of many texts in
many different character sets. Babble respects the directionality of different
languages in text-wrapping, allows text display columns to be vertical or
horizontal, permits selective scroll-locking of text columns, and performs
string and mark searches. This software, currently written in Motif and C++, is
being ported to Java, and we expect the Java version to be SGML-aware.