Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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was aimed at two types of users: general users of libraries who wished to exam<strong>in</strong>e manuscripts, and
“professional students of texts” or philologists, whom they def<strong>in</strong>ed as “critical editors of classical or
medieval works that are hand-written on material supports of various types (paper, papyrus, stone)”
(Bozzi and Calabretto 1997). The authors thus developed a “philological workstation” that <strong>in</strong>cluded
four major features: (1) the ability to look up digital images <strong>in</strong> an archive; (2) the transcription,
annotation, and <strong>in</strong>dex<strong>in</strong>g of images; (3) the view<strong>in</strong>g of transcribed versions of texts and creat<strong>in</strong>g an
“Index Locorum”; and (4) the automatic match<strong>in</strong>g of words found <strong>in</strong> transcriptions, the “Index
Locorum,” and annotations with the relevant portion of the source-document image that conta<strong>in</strong>s the
word. This last feature, while desired by many other digital edition and manuscript projects, is still an
area of unresolved and active research (Cayless 2008, Cayless 2009, Porter et al. 2009).
In an overview of their philological workstation, Bozzi and Calabretto listed the functions that it
supported. To beg<strong>in</strong> with, the workstation allowed users to search manuscript collections and to create
transcriptions of digital images of manuscripts and export them as RTF or SGML. One important
feature was the <strong>in</strong>dex<strong>in</strong>g of transcriptions that could be used by philologists to generate an “Index
Verborum” and an “Index Locorum” for each script <strong>in</strong> the manuscript (e.g., Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong>). The
“Index Verborum” conta<strong>in</strong>ed all the words appear<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> the transcription and the words that were
corrected by the user (us<strong>in</strong>g the text variant function), while the “Index Locorum” displayed “the
positions <strong>in</strong> which each word occurs <strong>in</strong> the manuscript.” In addition, annotations could be created on
manuscript transcriptions, and all annotations conta<strong>in</strong>ed two dist<strong>in</strong>ct fields, one for free comments and
the critical apparatus, and one for variants, synonyms, and the correction of syntax. The BAMBI
workstation also supported automatic column and l<strong>in</strong>e recognition and, even more important, the
automatic creation of a word-image concordance (if a transcription for a manuscript was available) that
matches each word of the text with the appropriate portion of the image. The concordance was built
automatically, and this module provided a simultaneous view of the transcription and the image so the
user could check its accuracy. It also allowed the user to query the manuscript collection by select<strong>in</strong>g a
word <strong>in</strong> either the transcription or on the image. The BAMBI prototype made use of HyTime (an
extension of SGML) to model works on ancient manuscripts, <strong>in</strong> particular because it allowed
“specification of l<strong>in</strong>ks between text and part of image (part of an object).”
While the fuller technical details of this workstation are somewhat outdated as of this writ<strong>in</strong>g, the
unanswered issues identified by the BAMBI project are still largely relevant for digital philology.
Bozzi and Calabretto noted that the follow<strong>in</strong>g requirements needed to be met: better standards-based
tools for the description of manuscripts; more sophisticated image-process<strong>in</strong>g rout<strong>in</strong>es (although they
called for the enhancement of microfilm images rather than the images of manuscripts themselves); “a
comprehensive solution for the management of text variants”; “tools based on image process<strong>in</strong>g
facilities and l<strong>in</strong>guistic (statistical) facilities for the electronic restoration of miss<strong>in</strong>g text elements”;
new models for collaborative work (though work today has moved beyond client-server models based
on the web); and a survey of the technical and legal issues <strong>in</strong>volved <strong>in</strong> creat<strong>in</strong>g “widespread, multisource
services offer<strong>in</strong>g digital versions of library materials and the tools for their use” (Bozzi and
Calabretto 1997). As has been seen <strong>in</strong> this review, the challenges of manuscript description, advanced
image process<strong>in</strong>g, the management of text variants, the creation of sophisticated digital tools,
collaborative workspaces, and comprehensive open-source digital libraries rema<strong>in</strong> topics of concern.
Other research <strong>in</strong> digital philology has been conducted by the Aristarchus project, 519 and an article by
Franco Montanari (Montanari 2004) has provided an overview of the electronic tools for classical
519 http://www.aristarchus.unige.it/<strong>in</strong>dex_<strong>in</strong>glese.php