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

18
Schibel and Rydberg-Cox argued that good bibliographic description is required for this historical
source material (ideally so that such collections can be sorted by period, place, language, literary
genre, publisher, and audience), particularly s<strong>in</strong>ce many digitized texts will often be reused <strong>in</strong> other
contexts. A second recommendation made by Schibel and Rydberg-Cox (2006) is the need to identify
at least basic structural metadata for such books (e.g., front, body, back) or to create a rough table of
contents that provides a framework by which to make page images available. They suggested that such
structural metadata would support new research <strong>in</strong>to traditional questions of textual <strong>in</strong>fluence for
researchers who could use automatic text-similarity measures to recognize text families and trace either
the <strong>in</strong>fluence of major authors or the purposes of a given document. Despite such new opportunities,
problems rema<strong>in</strong>. An <strong>in</strong>itial analysis by the authors of digital libraries of page images of early modern
books revealed that page images produced were often <strong>in</strong>accurate or <strong>in</strong>adequate, OCR tools were not
yet flexible enough to produce transcriptions, and automated tagg<strong>in</strong>g and l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g is far more difficult
with “pre-standardized language.”
Schibel and Rydberg-Cox concluded, however, that the greatest challenge faced <strong>in</strong> provid<strong>in</strong>g access to
early modern books is that l<strong>in</strong>guistic tools for Early Modern Lat<strong>in</strong> are considerably underdeveloped:
Aside from the issues outl<strong>in</strong>ed above, two major challenges face humans and computers alike.
First, we have no comprehensive dictionary of Neo-Lat<strong>in</strong>. Readers must cope with neologisms
or, often much harder to decipher, idioms and turns of expression of particular groups. Second,
aside from morphological analyzers such as Morpheus—the Lat<strong>in</strong> morphological analyzer
found <strong>in</strong> the Perseus Digital Library—we have few computational tools for Lat<strong>in</strong>. Even
Morpheus does not use contextual clues to prioritize analyses, and we are not aware of any
substantive work on named entity recognition <strong>in</strong> Lat<strong>in</strong>. We do not yet have mature electronic
authority lists for the Greco-Roman world, much less the people, places, etc. of the early
modern period (Schibel and Rydberg Cox 2006).
Some of the issues listed here, such as the development of l<strong>in</strong>guistic tools for early modern Lat<strong>in</strong>, have
received further attention <strong>in</strong> the past four years by authors such as Reddy and Crane (2006). They
tested the abilities of the commercial OCR ABBY F<strong>in</strong>eReader and the open-source document
recognition system Gamera 56 to recognize glyphs <strong>in</strong> early modern Lat<strong>in</strong> documents. They found that
after extensive tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g Gamera could recognize about 80 percent of glyphs while F<strong>in</strong>eReader could
recognize about 84 percent. To improve the character-recognition output, they recommended the use of
language model<strong>in</strong>g for future work.
Rydberg-Cox (2009) also explored some of the computational challenges <strong>in</strong> creat<strong>in</strong>g a corpus of early
Modern Lat<strong>in</strong> and reported on work from the NEH project, “Approach<strong>in</strong>g the Problems of Digitiz<strong>in</strong>g
Lat<strong>in</strong> Incunables.” The primary aim of this project was to exam<strong>in</strong>e the “challenges associated with
represent<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> digital form the complex and non-standard typefaces used <strong>in</strong> these texts to abbreviate
words” a practice that was done <strong>in</strong> imitation of medieval handwrit<strong>in</strong>g practice. Such features of early
typography occurred at vary<strong>in</strong>g rates <strong>in</strong> different books, Rydberg-Cox noted, but they do appear so
frequently that no digitization project can fail to consider them. This issue was also faced by the
Archimedes Digital Library 57 project, which, when digitiz<strong>in</strong>g texts published between 1495 and 1691,
discovered between three and five abbreviations on every pr<strong>in</strong>ted page. Rydberg-Cox emphasized that
56 http://gamera.<strong>in</strong>formatik.hsnr.de/. In March 2011, the Gamera Project announced that they were releas<strong>in</strong>g a GreekOCR Toolkit
(http://gamera.<strong>in</strong>formatik.hsnr.de/addons/greekocr4gamera/), an OCR system that can be used for “polytonal Greek text documents.” Although still <strong>in</strong> the
test<strong>in</strong>g stage, it <strong>in</strong>cludes extensive documentation and the ability to recognize accents.
57 http://archimedes.fas.harvard.edu/