Tools for Digital Humanities

Tools for Digital Humanities 

Implementation of the Mirador high-resolution viewer on Rosetta 

Roxanne Wyns 

Business Consultant Heron 

Stephan Pauls 

Software architect

LIBIS @ KU Leuven 

• Division of Leuven Research and Development (LRD) 

• Part of the University Library 

• Information solutions for GLAM and digitally supported 

research 

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Information management systems, research databases, … 

Apps, end-user experiences 

Visualization tools 

Standards and data interoperability services 

Long-term preservation & accessibility of digital material 

… 

IGeLU 2015 - Tools for Digital Humanities 

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Alamire project 

Requirements and selection of tools 


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• Alamire = 

– International Centre for the Study of Music in the Low Countries 

– Digitize medieval music manuscripts at high resolution (80 - 100 

million pixels) for research 

• Integrated Database for Early Music (IDEM) project 

requirements: 

– Data model and query options 

– Collaboration with other researchers 

– Long term preservation of content 

– High resolution viewer! 

http://www.alamirefoundation.org/ 


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• Proposal prepared in collaboration with LIBIS (Flemish Hercules 

infrastructure call, September 2013) 

• Kick-off summer 2014, launch of IDEM summer 2015 

• Project funding: 

– Main budget preserved for storage & long term preservation 

– Limited resources for database, website, and viewer 

– Currently no budget for post-project maintenance 

This influenced the selection of tools 


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Decision to: 

Reuse a combination of existing tools in a flexible way 

Use open source where possible to limit the license costs 

Share development costs with projects with similar interests 

CollectiveAccess, Omeka, Rosetta, IIIF Mirador viewer 

Inform partner: 

Limitations and what they can expect 

Open source doesn’t means free 


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Visualization requirements 

• Giving access to high resolution images in a novel way 

– Quick, without loss of quality (JPEG2000) 

– Easy navigation within manuscript 

– Full screen, tool bars should take up limited space 

– Extensive zooming options in a single and fluid movement, 

focused on selected area 

– Compare folio’s from different manuscripts in a single view 

– Illegal download protection, watermarks 

– ... 


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Selection of IIIF Mirador viewer 

• Virtual Vellum prototype image viewer suggested by Alamire 

– Developed by University of Sheffield 

– Issues: no updates since 2008, Java development 

• Suggestion by LIBIS to use IIIF/Mirador instead 

• Some remarks on demo version tested by Alamire (v. 0.9.0, 

http://showcase.iiif.io/viewer/mirador/): 

Mayor: 

Endless pop-ups 


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Mayor: 



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Mayor: 


Limited full screen view 


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Mayor: 




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Mayor: 



Minor: 

Issues with Internet Explorer 

Limitation on zoom function 


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Technical implementation in Rosetta 

Mirador v2.0 

Rosetta v4.1.0 


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http://iiif.io 


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Image API 

This specification concerns image requests by a client, but not 

management of the images by the server. It covers how to respond to 

the requests given in a particular URI syntax 

Example url 

http://services.libis.be/iipsrv/iipsrv.fcgi?iiif=25/83/25/1/1/Derivative_Hi 

gh/REP2622675/7.jp2/2048,0,394,1024/99,/0/default.jpg 

Applications 

– Digital image repositories and distributed content networks. 

– Image focused web applications, such as pan/zoom viewers, book 

readers, etc. 

– Client applications using image content for analysis or comparison. 


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IIPImage Server 

• Fully supports delivery of images via URLs as specified in the IIIF 

Image API 

• Open source fast cgi server (written in C++-) runs under apache 

• Supports JPEG2000 , pyramid TIFFs. 


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Presentation API 

Objectives and scope 

• Provide the information necessary to allow a rich, online 

viewing environment for primarily image-based objects to be 

presented to a human user, likely in conjunction with 

the IIIF ImageAPI 

• Use of JSON-LD format or JavaScript Object Notation 

for Linked Data 

A lightweight Linked Data format. It is easy for humans to read and 

write. 


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Primary Resource Types 

Basic JSON LD syntax elements, in hierarchical order: 

• Manifest 

The overall description of the structure and properties of the digital 

representation of an object. 

• Sequence 

The order of the views of a physical object. 

• Canvas 

A virtual container that represents a page or view and has content 

resources associated with it or with parts of it. 

• Content 

Content resources such as images or texts that are associated with a 

canvas. 


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Viewer plugin for Rosetta 

A java VPP jar plugin, which 

• Creates the manifest files per entity dynamically. 

• Afterwards creates an html file which collects all the entity 

manifest files of one entity type, 


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SW sequence diagram 

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DeliveryManager 

1 2 

Mirador 

Viewer PP 

plugin 

/Operational_shared/.../ 

EntityTypeIndex.html 

/Operational_shared/.../Im 

ages to view 

/Operational_shared/.../ 

/IExxxxxManifest.json 

Mirador Web interface 

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Web Output 

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IIP Server 


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Settings in Rosetta 


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Final adaptations and bug-fixes 

• Small adaptations to comply to Alamire requirements 

– ‘Save as’ function disabled to prevent easy download 

– Tool & lay-out ribbons minimized 

• Version 2.0 release issues and configuration problems fixed 

IDEM website & database launched on August 17th 


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Mirador in action - DEMO 

IDEM website: http://www.idemdatabase.org/ 


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Single object view 


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Full screen view 


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Other view options 


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Library overview 


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Book view (simultaneous scroll options) 


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Compare objects 


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Composite libraries 

Manifest Yale manuscript: http://manifests.ydc2.yale.edu/manifest/Admont43 


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Future plans with IIIF & Mirador 

• Implementation of access rights control 

• Implement IIPImage server more widely to create manifestation 

and watermarks on the fly instead during ingest 

• Simultaneous view of image, transcriptions and annotations (by 

getting metadata out of Rosetta web service) 

• Adding multispectral view support to Mirador (e.g. 

IIPMooViewer) 


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Thank you ! 

Questions ? 

Roxanne Wyns, Business Consultant Heron 

Roxanne.Wyns@libis.kuleuven.be 

Stephan Pauls, Software architect 

Stefan.Pauls@libis.kuleuven.be 

www.libis.be / www.kuleuven.be 

Information. 

Innovation. 

Inspiration.

Tools for Digital Humanities

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