Kevin S. Kiernan

Digital imagery for significant cultural and historical materials

Digital imagery for significant cultural and historical materials is an emerging research field that bridges people, culture, and technologies. In this paper, we first discuss the great importance of this field. Then we focus on its four interrelated subareas: (1) creation and preservation, (2) retrieval, (3) presentation and usability, and (4) applications and use. We propose several mechanisms to encourage collaboration and argue that the field has high potential impact on our digital society. Finally, we make specific recommendations on what to pursue in this field.

Support for XML markup of image-based electronic editions

Image-based electronic editions enable researchers to view and study in an electronic environment historical manuscript images intricately linked to edition, transcript, glossary and apparatus files. Building image-based electronic editions poses a two-fold challenge. For humanities scholars, it is important to be able to use image and text to successfully encode the desired features of the manuscripts. Computer Scientists must find mechanisms for representing markup in its association both with the images, text and other auxiliary files and for making the representation available for efficient querying. This paper addresses the architecture of one such solution, that uses efficient data structures to store image-based encodings in main memory and on disk.

Building image-based electronic editions using the edition production technology

We demonstrate the Edition Production Technology (EPT), an integrated development environment for building Image-based Electronic Editions (IBEE). EPT is developed in Java on top of Eclipse platform and benefits from the openness of Eclipses plugin architecture and its portability (currently EPT runs on Windows XP, Linux, and Mac OS X). EPT provides software support for building image-based digital libraries of historic documents. Starting with high resolution images of manuscripts and transcriptions of them, EPT tools provide support for creating XML encoding of the electronic edition, searching the electronic edition, linking text and images, and publishing the electronic edition (using filters and XSLT)

Extended XQuery for digital libraries

Documents have, in general, a multihierarchical structure (such as physical organization in the form of pages and lines, content organization in the form of paragraphs and sentences, etc.). Searching multihierarchical XML encoding presents a number of unique challenges for both computer scientists and document experts. We present an extension of the XQuery language suitable for searching multihierarchical XML

Old English Manuscripts: The Scribal Deconstruction of “Early” Northumbrian

(1990). Old English Manuscripts: The Scribal Deconstruction of “Early” Northumbrian. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 48-55.

The state of the Beowulf manuscript 1882—1983

There is a lingering notion among Beowulf scholars, despite Chauncey Tinkers effort to dispel it eighty years ago, that the Beowulf manuscript is slowly but inexorably crumbling away in its modern home in the British Library. The gloomy news for a general audience is that the manuscript, ‘charred at the edges by the fire’ that decimated the Cotton Library in 1731, ‘continues to deteriorate year by year’. A scholarly audience gets the same impression from Norman Davis, who gives us a reproduction of an old transliteration beside new photographs of the manuscript. He says, ‘Zupitzas transliteration … has permanent value as a record of what he could see in the manuscript in 1880–2’, a comment that certainly implies that Zupitza was able to see more in the manuscript a century ago than we can see today. In fact, with the aid of modern artificial lighting, notably fibre-optic and ultra-violet light, we can see far more in the manuscript today than Zupitza was able to see in 1882.