digital research beyond texts

Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden slub-dresden.de

© Creative Commons Namensnennung 3.0

Understanding and analysing digital texts

as images

3 October 2013

Digitization and Ist Impact on Society

International Summer School, Dresden

Juan Garcés

Digital research beyond texts

http://www.slub-dresden.de/



http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/de/






Overview

2. Oktober 2013 | Seite 2

Defining terms

digital incunabula

digitized vs digital scholarship

Images: some fundamentals

Producing a digital manuscript edition for digitized scholarship

Towards digital image analysis

What about sound (and image)?

Juan Garcés | Abteilung Benutzung und Information










Defining terms










Defining terms (1): digital incunabula


“New media begin by solving well known problems but also by

imitating the forms that precede them.” (Crane et al. 2006)

“Digital incunabula“ are digital objects created in anticipation of

an use that is (still) merely a more convenient (faster, safer,

juxtaposable, etc.) variant of traditional modes of perception.











Defining terms (2): digitized vs digital scholarship


Digitized scholarship is scholarship that takes advantages of

digitization by using digital data as more convenient surrogates

for non-digital representations.

Digital scholarship is scholarship that applies digital methods (in

addition or instead of traditional methods) to the analysis of

digital data.











Images: some fundamentals










Images: some fundamentals (1)


pixels (in bitmapped digital images):

discreet units of information about a particular point of an image (hue,

lightness, saturation, place within a grid)

pixels (physically on print or screen):

actual physical ‘dots’ (usually square) on an output device

smalles programmable element on the display surface

variable depending on the size of the display grid

resolution

number of pixels on a given area (often described as dpi)











Images: some fundamentals (2)


interpolation:

mathematical creation of ‘missing data’ when resizing images (up and down ‘sampling’)

bit depth

amount of colour information stored for each individual pixel

image size

size of the file in kilobytes (‘file size’) image height x image width x dots per inch2 x bit depth

size of image in pixels (‘pixel dimensions’)

size of resulting image when printed

compression

reduces the physical size of a block of information by reducing the amount of memory

required to restore a particular data set

efficiency vs accuracy











Producing a digital manuscript edition

for digitized scholarship











Codex Sinaiticus: the world‘s oldest Bible











Codex Sinaiticus: what survives where


Originally: 1486 pages (743 folios)

just over 55%!

Library Extent

London, British Library 694 pages (347 folios)

Leipzig, University Library 86 pages (43 folios)

Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery 36* pages (18 folios)

St Petersburg, National Library of Russia

8 pages (4 folios)

Total: 824 pages (412 folios)











Codex Sinaiticus Modern History

St Petersburg

Leipzig Mt Sinai

1844

Virtual

Re-

unification

London

1933

1859

(1869)











content metadata

digital surrogate transcription

translation

physical description










The Project’s success


positive critical appraisal

“new gold standard”

“new standard of excellence”

huge popularity:

over 10 million hits in the first two days of the full launch alone

over 1 million unique users by the end of the first month

over 2 million unique users by the end of 2010

ca. 40,000 unique users every month in the first year

democratisation of access:

surprising spread of countries

e.g. the country with the fourth highest number of visitors was Brazil











split, folio 1 recto

split repair

Quire 34, folio 8 recto










Towards digital image analysis











(Bro

wn

& S

ea

les

20

01

)












(Baumann & Seales 2009)











The uses of image registration


TED talk

Blaise Agüera y Arcas:

How PhotoSynth can connect the world's images

http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html















(Te

rra

s 2

00

6)












(Terras 2006)









Scribe A (Q76-f3v-c1) Scribe B1 (Q46-f3v-c4) Scribe B2 (Q57-f4r-c4) Scribe D (Q37-f5v-c2)