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

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“develop a new web-based, modular, collaborative image markup tool for both manual and semiautomated
l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g between encoded text and image of text, and image annotation” and has just
announced the release of TILE 0.9. 136 Doug Reside of this project recently outl<strong>in</strong>ed on the TILE blog a
“four-layer model for image-based editions” that was designed to address long-term preservation
issues and clearly outl<strong>in</strong>e responsibilities for digital librarians and scholars (Reside 2010).
The first level <strong>in</strong>volves the digitization of source materials, particularly their long-term curation and
distribution <strong>in</strong> open formats with the use of regular and progressive nam<strong>in</strong>g systems. Reside made the
useful suggestion that grant<strong>in</strong>g agencies should consider requir<strong>in</strong>g content providers to ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong> stable
uniform resource identifiers (URIs) for at least 10 to 15 years for all digital objects. The second level
for image based-editions <strong>in</strong>volves metadata creation, and Reside argued that all metadata external to
the file itself (e.g., descriptive rather than technical metadata) belong at this level. He also proposed
that <strong>in</strong>stitutions or <strong>in</strong>dividuals that did not create the digital files should probably create such metadata:
While the impulse towards quality assurance and thorough work is laudable, a perfectionist
policy that delays publication of prelim<strong>in</strong>ary work is better suited for immutable pr<strong>in</strong>t media
than an extensible digital archive. In our model, content providers need not wait to provide
content until it has been processed and catalogued (Reside 2010).
By open<strong>in</strong>g the task of catalog<strong>in</strong>g and resource description to a larger audience, Reside hypothesized
that far more content could get onl<strong>in</strong>e quickly and be available for reuse. Separat<strong>in</strong>g metadata and
content would also allow multiple transcriptions or metadata to po<strong>in</strong>t to the same item’s URI.
The third level of the TILE model <strong>in</strong>volves the <strong>in</strong>terface layer, an often-ignored feature <strong>in</strong> the move to
get open content available onl<strong>in</strong>e. While Reside granted that more transcriptions and files <strong>in</strong> open
repositories is a useful first step, many humanities scholars still need <strong>in</strong>terfaces that do more than
access on file at a time. He also recognized that while Software Environment for the Advancement of
Scholarly Research (SEASR) is try<strong>in</strong>g to create a susta<strong>in</strong>able model for <strong>in</strong>teroperable digital
humanities tools, their work has not yet met with wide-scale adoption. At this most critical layer,
Reside outl<strong>in</strong>ed the TILE approach:
We propose a code framework for web-based editions, first implemented <strong>in</strong> JavaScript us<strong>in</strong>g
the popular jQuery library, but adaptable to other languages when the prevalent w<strong>in</strong>ds of web
development change. An <strong>in</strong>stance of this framework is composed of a manifest file (probably <strong>in</strong>
XML or JSON 137 format) that identifies the locations of the relevant content and any associated
metadata and a core file (similar to, but considerably leaner than, the core jQuery.js file at the
heart of the popular JavaScript library) with a system of “hooks” onto which developers might
hang widgets they develop for their own editions. A widget, <strong>in</strong> this context, is a program with
limited functionality that provides well-def<strong>in</strong>ed responses to specific <strong>in</strong>put (Reside 2009).
This model thus <strong>in</strong>cludes a manifest file that conta<strong>in</strong>s all content locations and associated metadata,
and a core file, or base text, that can be used by different developers to create their own digital editions
utiliz<strong>in</strong>g their own tools or “widgets.” Widgets should depend only on the core files, Reside argued,
not on each other, and ideally they could be shared between scholars. Reside admitted that basically
they are propos<strong>in</strong>g the development of a “content management system” (CMS) for manag<strong>in</strong>g
136 This software and its functionality are discussed later <strong>in</strong> this paper.
137 JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation is a “lightweight data-<strong>in</strong>terchange format” that is based on the JavaScript programm<strong>in</strong>g language but is also a
“text format that is completely language <strong>in</strong>dependent.” (http://www.json.org/)