D M : Tools For Digital Annotation and Linking

Overview

DM is an environment for the study and annotation of images and texts. It is a suite of tools, enabling scholars to gather and organize the evidence necessary to support arguments based in digitized resources. DM enables users to mark fragments of interest in manuscripts, print materials, photographs, etc. and provide commentary on these resources and the relationships among them. A principle objective in this project is to continue to develop our understanding of scholarly work processes in order to effectively support research as it is practiced now, while opening the door for new methods of scholarship to emerge.

In this phase of development, we are collaborating with several use cases in the humanities. These projects are directed by scholars from a range of fields including: English literature, art history, French literature, and musicology. Resources of interest in these projects include digitized versions of Old English, Latin, and French manuscripts and medieval maps and scrolls.

DM at its most basic is a tool for linking media. There are four types of resources with which DM permits the user to work: images, texts, and fragments of images or texts as marked out by a user. A user may create links between any combination of resources. The most common is a link from a textual annotation to the image, text, or fragment it describes. In many projects, a single annotation will reference (e.g., for comparison) fragments from several images. DM is designed to enable scholars to easily create these and other types of relationships among resources. See the fifteen-minute video directly below for demonstration of some of the DM Project's core functionality.
Also: we are currently adding short help videos that cover basic "how-to's" of using DM tools. These are listed at the bottom of the page.

Next Developmental Goals: In the next phase of DM development, we will be focusing primarily on the ability to: A) create and manage collections of images and texts; B) add the ability for users and groups in order to create, track and organize work by different collaborators within a working group; and C) easily "roll out" the linked and annotated data created within the DM enviroment to a wide array of standard publishing formats (e.g. for automated and updatable display within platforms such as Omeka, MediaWiki, and the like).

Use Cases

See the video above (the last few minutes) and images below for examples of the DM in several ongoing use cases. Current projects using DM include:

• Parker's Scribes: Scholars at the University of Toronto and the University of Oxford are using DM to distinguish and characterize the scribes of Archbishop Matthew Parker's manuscript collection. Their approach is based on the handwriting in scribal notations appearing throughout the more than 500 manuscripts in this collection.


• Dictionary of Old English (DOE): Using DM, scholars at the Dictionary of Old English are identifying and annotating examples of textual cruxes found in manuscripts in the Parker collection. Thumbnail images and annotation text will be included in DOE entries referencing cruxes.


• Virtual Mappa Project (Martin Foys, Drew University; Peter Barber, Kimberly Kowal, British Library): the original research initiative that led to the development of the DM Toolset. VMP is a case study in how medieval maps of the world and related geographic texts may be collected, annotated and networked, and includes maps from both the British Library and the Parker Library (Corpus Christie College, Cambridge). VMP is now beginning a more substantial partnership with the British Library to develop this project into a truly interoperable resource that can virtually collect and display content drawn from several digital repositories.


• La Chronique Anonyme Universelle jusques'à la mort de Charles VII (a translation, critical edition and detailed study of a fifteenth-century French world chronicle, to be published by Brepols Publishers in 2013) by Lisa Fagin-Davis. Dr. Fagin-Davis is using DM to create an interactive digital edition of this scroll to accompany her book.


• Insular and Anglo-Saxon Illuminated Manuscripts: An Iconographic Database, by Asa Simon Mittman (California State University, Chico). Dr. Mittman is using DM to develop a new digital edition of Thomas Ohlgren's Insular and Anglo-Saxon Illuminated Manuscripts: An Iconographic Catalogue, to expand access to, streamline the use of, and augment with digital images the original content of this invaluable print resource for medieval art historical study.


• Scholars at Stanford University and the University of Virginia are using DM to explore several research questions focused on the work of the fourteenth-century composer Guillaume de Machaut.

Partners

In addition to our use case partners, we are collaborating with the DMSTech project based at Stanford and including partners at the University of Toronto, Johns Hopkins University, St. Louis University, and Los Alamos National Lab.

Funding
History

DM grew out of the Digital Mappaemundi project, originally conceived by Martin Foys. Digital Mappaemundi is a project exploring annotation of medieval maps and geographic texts. Through that work we realized that the tools we were building were broadly applicable to humanities resources (and resources in other areas of study). We have since expanded the project, looking at scholarly activity across the humanities.

For a detailed overview of the first two phases of DM development, please see Bradshaw, S. and Foys, M. "Developing Digital Mappaemundi: An Agile Mode for Annotating Medieval Maps." Digital Medievalist 7 (2011). http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/7/foys/.

Co-Directors Contact

If you have questions or comments, please contact us at dm@drew.edu

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Help Files

Over the Spring of 2012, several short help videos covering basic features in DM will be gradually brought online.

. . .	. . . . . . .Panning and Zooming	. . .	. Creating & Editing Targets on Images	. . .	. Creating & Editing Targets on Texts
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. . .	. . . .Viewing Targets on Images	. . .	.Creating Annotations: Images & Texts	. . .	. . .Creating Links: Images & Texts
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