A few years ago I took part in an NEH-funded project to edit an Anglo-Latin book of Homilies, Pembroke College Library, Cambridge University, ms. 25 – also known as Pembroke 25. That project was directed by Paul Szarmach and Thomas N. Hall. The Pembroke 25 digital edition website is now hosted at the University of Notre Dame (http://www.nd.edu/~pemb25/Website-tv/index.html), but Dr. Hall has given me permission to host a version of the site here on my website. I hope to revisit this project and to modify and update it as I continue to grow my skill set.
This is the best access point for my version of the project. It includes a link to the page listing the sermons, as well as a link to a PDF manuscript description written by Rebecca Rushforth:
http://www.dotporterdigital.org/pembroke/nav.htm
This project was a great challenge at the time it was developed. The editors did their work in Microsoft Word, and it was my task to take those documents and make them into texts that could be read online, alongside the digital images of the manuscript pages. Because I’m not a programmer, I wasn’t in a position to build software to support such work, I took advantage of a few simple open-source options that were available to me. One is for publishing TEI-encoded texts online, the other is really an image annotation tool, but I was able to use it to generate files that were pretty close to what I wanted.
- TEI Viewer (http://teiviewer.org/), some simple jquery that uses the TEI-supplied XSLT stylesheets. The project page was last updated in 2008, so Pembroke 25 used the same version that is currently available
- The UVic Image Markup Tool (http://tapor.uvic.ca/~mholmes/image_markup/). The current version is 1.8.2.2, and I believe it’s been pretty much rewritten since this project finished. Notably the IMT now distinguishes between graphical and textual elements, which it did not at the time I was using it.
Each sermon has several different elements available:
- Source TEI/XML transcription
- PDF transcription
- HTML for each sermon, published in the TEIViewer (TV) platform
- Image of each page of the sermon, annotated using the IMT and displayed in HTML
In the sermon list, clicking on the title will take you to the TV view of the sermon text (in a new tab). Clicking on “View Features” in the right-hand menu will allow you to do things like show or hide line numbers, show deletions or editions, or show editorial notes. The folio numbers are links to the IMT-annotated page images – they also display in a new tab. Annotations include line-by-line transcriptions and editorial notes. Annotations can be selected from the lists in the drop-down menu. Mousing over the image will show bounding boxes, and clicking in the boxes will also bring up annotations.
There are many improvements that I intend to make here. Notably, there is no connection between the TV-published transcription and the annotated image files, aside from the link in the folio numbers. It should be possible to link back to the transcription from the image files. Also, there is no way to progress through the images (no forward and backward links). Just making these two changes would increase functionality greatly for this edition.