- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab,
I'm Tom Zinnen and I work here
at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW-Extension, Cooperative Extension,
and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers,
Wisconsin Public Television,
the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW-Madison Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you Martin Foys.
He's a professor in the Department of English.
He was born in Bowling Green, Ohio,
and went to Pope Paul VI High School
in Haddonfield, New Jersey.
Then he went undergrad to Drew University
in Madison, New Jersey, and studied English and theater.
And then he got his PhD at the University,
excuse me at Loyola University in Chicago
and that was in English literature,
specifically Old and Middle English literature.
He post-doc'd at Hall the University in Yorkshire
in the United Kingdom
and then took his first faculty position
at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Then he moved on to Hood College in Frederick, Maryland
and then back to Drew University in New Jersey
and then he spent some time at King's College in London.
He is very well traveled.
Professionally, he says this is the last place he ever
wants to work, ever ever.
(audience laughing)
Yeah, must be the ice-fishing.
(audience laughing)
He came here to UW-Madison in 2014.
He's going to talk with us about something
that's intriguing to me and anybody who loves charts
and carts and maps, the Digital Mappa project.
Please join me in welcoming Martin Foys
to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
(audience applauding)
Okay.
First of all, thank you Tom and everyone involved
for having me today.
When I accepted this speaking date,
which was open, mysteriously open,
I didn't realize it was the day before grades are due.
And so this is gonna be a rather extemporaneous talk,
I hope everyone's okay with that.
I'm gonna be talking about a lot of different things today,
and let me just preface all of that by saying
you can basically ignore everything I say
and just go to digitalmappa.org at your leisure,
and peruse, and almost everything I'm talking about
in terms of the resource I'm presenting
and its potential and power is packed into this website.
I would also at the opening,
because I always forget to do these things,
I would like to thank the funders and sponsors
and supporters of these projects,
specifically the Mellon Foundation,
the National Endowment for the Humanities,
and right now I'm very grateful to the WARF Foundation
here at UW for our current UW 2020 grant,
which is funding a lot of this initial or current work.
Also if you are so inclined
you can scurry on over to Twitter
and follow us @digitalmappa, @digitalmappa.
We just went live with our twitter account last month
and we already have 600 followers,
which sounds like a lot but it actually isn't.
So here's the very very quick take,
the executive executive summary
of what I'm going to be talking about today.
The DM project, short for Digital Mappa,
is essentially a resource that allows any individual
to make their own DH, digital humanities workspaces,
collaborations, projects, and open access,
freely publicly available scholarly publications.
To allow us to allow anybody to make their own
digital humanities workspaces, collaborations,
projects and open access
or publicly available scholarly publications,
for collections of digital collections of images and texts.
Basically, because here's the deal.
If you think about what it takes currently,
as an academic in the humanities,
to produce a digital project,
something that is sophisticated its digital entity
and functionality, you need to know a lot more
than the academic specialties that you already have.
The metaphor I like to use is an automotive one.
If right now as an academic we just want to get in a car
and drive it somewhere, we're really excited, it's a really nice car.
It's not a Tesla 'cause we're in the Humanities.
I will not be showing up here next year with my Tesla.
But it's a nice car and we want to be able to get in.
And currently, the current state,
although this is changing of digital humanities
and scholarly tools is that you kinda need to be a mechanic still,
you need to be able to open the hood and figure out
how the engine works and do a little fiddling
just to even get it started and everything.
And so we're trying to change that with the DM project.
And basically if you can click, type, copy, and paste,
you can use this project and I'm gonna show you tonight
some of the things you could already do with it.
But first, I'm gonna give you
a little theoretical background to all this.
Why we need a resource like this.
So what I'm showing you here is a picture of library stacks.
Here's the deal, library stacks are the way
in which we currently, still,
constrain the data of the past through scholarly inquiry.
The way in which all that stuff we have
that has survived from the past,
that has been discovered and saved
and preserved and archived.
What we do to make sense of it is,
scholars go in and they study it,
and they bring a specific set of specialties
and methodological tools and insights,
and then they produce essays and monographs and books.
And that is the way in which you constrain this data
into something that is usable.
And for hundreds of years that's the way we have done it.
So just remember that.
And the second thing I want to show you is--
This is a-- You can't see him in this here
because it's his Twitter account but it's sort of hidden now.
This is Will Noel, who used to be
the director of Manuscripts and Early Modern Books
at the Walters Museum in Baltimore.
And he's now head of the Schomburg Institute
for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
And he's sort of, for me, we can't call him a saint
'cause he's still alive, so he's,
in the Christian paradigm, he's achieved blessed status
in the digital humanities.
And this is one of his recent tweets,
or a couple years ago now that really stuck with me:
"The value of the material artifact is what it is.
"The value of a digital image is what you can do with it."
And what we have seen over the past two or three decades
is an increasing initiative to digitize
everything we have preserved from the past.
And that's interesting in and of itself,
because what that allows is better access.
If you have online capability,
you can generally get now to so many things
that 20 to 30 years ago just were simply inaccessible
unless you were able to access them as a physical object.
So that's good, but we can't stop there.
The idea is that with new technologies,
it brings with it new logics, new ways to work,
new ways to produce scholarly inquiry and production.
And so this is exactly what Will Noel says,
once you have a digital image
you can begin to do things with it.
In keeping with that, here's another--
I can call him a patron saint, 'cause he's from quite,
quite a while ago now.
Vanaver Bush wrote a seminal essay in 1945
called "As We May Think"
where he imagined, back in the '40s,
this kind of workspace that would use electronic
and perhaps computing technology
to serve up all sorts of archival data for study
and for linking together, a real visionary.
And what he said in 1945 when I read this a years ago
in graduate school, it always stuck with me.
"The summation of human experience is being expanded
"at a prodigious rate, but the means we are used
"to threading through the consequent maze
"to the momentarily important item is the same as we used
"in the days of the square-rigged ships in the 18th century."
You know, the 17th century, he's basically saying,
nothing has changed in the way in which
we produce our scholarship and information
for processing the ideas of the human experience.
And even in the '40s he was saying information
is growing so prodigiously,
we need new ways to constrain the data.
So this gets us to the idea of electronic publishing
or digital publishing.
And I love this little image here
from this very well-meaning slideshow
about introduction of electronic publishing.
It's a flat screen monitor
that is essentially producing a bunch of antiquated books
and reproducing them on the screen.
And it says, what is electronic publishing?
This is only from a few years ago.
Oh, it's publishing e-books and distributing articles
and written information digitally or online and networks.
And this gets me to an important idea here
which is the notion of remediation.
Remediation is this theory from Media Studies, which is,
when a new technology comes along,
it brings with it a great capacity to do new things.
But in the first generation or two of that new technology
it replicates the logics and performance
and methodologies of the older media.
So you can think about back to say,
some of you may remember this,
when television first came on the scene
back in the '40s and '50s and '60s.
What it did for a couple of decades
is it simply replicated the idea of theater.
You had a single camera and it was just a single stage
and things went on and off and it took a long time
for television to develop its own logics.
And now television is a lot different than live theater
and indeed theater is beginning to,
and this is another aspect of remediation,
is beginning to accommodate the logic
of screen and television and such,
so it's a reciprocal, symbiotic kind of relationship.
So with regards to electronic publishing,
we now have digital publishing,
we now have an incredible set of new media technologies
at our disposal but we're not yet developing,
the logics of how to use them has not yet fully emerged,
and this is a classic case.
It is way more than literally
putting the books on the screen,
as this image suggests.
And this gets us to what is valuable about the DM resource
that we're beginning to develop.
So what I'm gonna do for you now
is give you a very quick backstory for how I got here.
So in the late 1990s, essentially, for my field,
in terms of digital humanities,
the prehistoric age practically,
we didn't even call it digital humanities,
we called it computing in the humanities
or humanities computing at the time.
I ended up doing as part of my dissertation,
my doctoral work, a digital edition of the Bayeux Tapestry,
which some of you, I'm sure, are aware of but if you're not,
it's a 230-foot-long woven linen embroidery
that depicts, from the 11th century, late 11th century,
that depicts the events of the Battle of Hastings
and the Norman Conquest and miraculously has survived 900 years.
I'm holding out, I was born in 1968,
so if I can make it to '98
I will live to the millennium celebration of 1066
and the Norman Conquest.
So we'll see how it goes.
So this is it, it's now available online,
you can go and find it and subscribe to it
and it's all kind of fun.
But when it was first produced, it was produced on CD-ROM
that's how long ago this was.
So it was exciting and fun and it really opened up for me
a lot of ideas about how we can use digital technology
to begin to produce new ways to study these objects.
The big deal about the Bayeux Tapestry
is that it's a 230-foot-long scroll.
So I was able to reassemble it digitally
so you could scroll it past you
as a viewer as you were viewing it.
So preserving, yet reversing the relationship
of the object to the viewer.
And when you go to the (speaking in foreign language)
in Bayeux, in Normandy,
you have to walk yourself past the object
and now instead, you move the object past you.
But it preserved that, the continuity of that object
in a way that books just simply could not,
books must break this object apart.
So that was epiphanic for me, eye opening.
To say wow, digital technology can do things
that we can't do in the older forms of media.
And so, I'm a man of little imagination,
and when I have an idea I just hold onto it jealously
and never let go of it and keep working on it.
So when I finished all of that
and got it published and everything, I didn't really know what to do next.
And I thought well, I think I'll just go
and find another interesting medieval object
that is kind of resistant to study in print in a number of ways,
and sort of falls in the cracks between different genres
and disciplines, like the Bayeux Tapestry did.
The tapestry, what is it, is it history, is it art?
It's got text in it in Latin. Is it a literary account?
There's all ways that you can come at it.
And so that brought me to maps and what you're looking at here
is the Cotton Anglo-Saxon map of the world
from the late 10th or early 11th century.
It's the first detailed,
descriptive, detailed, English medieval map in existence,
or map in existence, I guess, of the world.
And it's really fascinating,
you might have trouble orienting yourself to this
because it actually has true orientation.
East is up here at the top.
So this is North so you have to turn your head to begin,
all right just like that, to look at it.
Here's England down here.
Here's the Mediterranean.
That's Italy, there's Rome right there.
So there's Britain, there's Ireland.
Even all the way out here is Thule, Ultimate Thule.
Perhaps Iceland or something.
Yes, perhaps even Greenland.
Ultimate Thule was often taken to represent Greenland there,
although Iceland does peskily get in between those two on the way.
So I thought, you know what, I'm gonna do a digital edition of this,
just like I did a digital edition of the Bayeux Tapestry.
Because remember, I'm a man of small imagination.
So this turned out to be rather complicated.
The reason being is that the Cotton Mappa Mundi,
Cotton Map, is full of information.
It has 147 inscriptions taken from all different sources.
There's stuff from late classical historical sources
in geographic accounts of the world.
There's information packed in there from biblical sources,
most predominately Scripture.
There's also a lot of localized knowledge
happening down in that lower corner near England,
Britain, and Scandinavia.
And so for instance here,
and it's got a lot of relationships to other texts
and then other maps that contain the same amount of data.
So here's Conrad Miller's 1895 edition of this map
from the (speaking in foreign language),
the Oldest World Maps, or the Old World Maps.
And what he's done here, you can't really see it,
but I'll just tell you, he's given every single inscription
that shows up on this map
and then he's given every possible source
he's been able to discover that ties in.
And what he's essentially doing there
is creating on paper in the 19th century
a relational database.
He's trying to see how do these things
all fit together and tie into each other,
how do they all intersect, yet he's doing it
in the rather limiting form of print, the print media.
And so I thought great, I'm gonna take this,
I'll be able to do this for medieval world maps.
Or the Cotton Map specifically.
And so this is a very early Mellon-funded project
called EPPT, Electronic Presentation
and Production Technology,
which was being used to take medieval manuscripts
and mark up the individual words
and connect them to transcriptions of the text on the medieval manuscripts.
And this was all happening in 2003, 2004.
And I was using XML, at the time a hot new technology
for how you would mark up and encode information online.
And so you can just see here I was able to create
a bounding box around Babylonia.
I've tied it here to Babylon in Orosius' classical,
or Old English translation of Orosius' account
of the geographic description of the world that a lot of this map is taken from.
And then down here's all the code that it's spitting out.
And that was really interesting, but what I realized was that,
wow, all the work I was doing for this one map
would serve editions of all these other maps
that shared its information.
And so, what made me realize is that I shouldn't be
trying to edit a single document, a single object,
I should be working to create a resource
that would enable me to create a network of information
that can be shared among all these medieval objects.
And so that got me finally to Digital Mappa Mundi,
which is called that, called the DM project,
Digital Mappa, because it was originally designed
to produce this resource that would allow us
to edit a cohort, a continuing cohort,
of early medieval maps of the world.
But as you'll see it's grown far beyond that.
So here's the basic functionality of the DM project.
I'm using it in connection to the Cotton Map here,
so the object that started it all.
And it's very simple. The elevator speech here,
or the elevator speech I used to give
before Facebook became rather problematic,
was that, you know how on Facebook you can essentially tag,
if there's a picture of somebody and you want to tag somebody's face
and then you can hang some information off it, you can say oh, that's Tom,
riding in his new Tesla.
Isn't this a nice picture?
That's essentially what DM does but on a vaster,
more sophisticated scale.
Yet at the same time you don't need
any great technological expertise to be able to do it.
It essentially allows you to create targeted moments
on images and on texts in the exact same way.
You can draw a box or shape around a bit of an image.
Or you can click on a string of text and create a highlight.
And then once you do that that becomes live,
and you can do only two things to it,
but it creates this very powerful structure, architecture
for information and data management.
You can only do two things once you do this.
You can link that thing to something else
or you can create an annotation for it.
You can create some text. But here's why it's powerful.
You can you can take this moment
and link it to any other moment on a text or an image.
So you can link it here to this highlight,
you can link it to another moment on this image,
another moment on another image.
And here's the second thing.
You can make as many links as you want to an object
and you can make as many annotations as you want
to a target on either text.
Once you create an annotation, that annotation,
this gets all very Russian dolls very quickly,
that annotation itself has text,
and so then you can turn some of that text
into another target and then link that up
to more moments on more objects or images or texts.
So you can see how quickly you can create
a very complicated data structure
just by being able to basically,
click, link, and type things.
Here's your tools up here.
Lines, circles, segmented lines,
squares, circles, and polygonal ways
in which to draw shapes around the area of interest
that you want to work with on the images.
So here's an example of that.
One of the test projects we're doing,
and I should, I should preface this all by saying
that almost everything you're gonna see is medieval.
Because I'm a medievalist and the first people
I was working with were medievalists,
and so everything we do is medieval.
But the resource is agnostic,
it doesn't care what data you feed into it.
It doesn't care what objects and text it's looking at.
So please from the beginning don't think
that this is just about maps or medieval manuscripts.
You have a collection of digital images
and texts you want to work with, they can work within DM.
There's no, it doesn't check
for the age of the facsimiles you're working with
before it tells you, you can use it.
So here's an example.
It's a bit of an introductory essay
about this Old English and Anglo Latin manuscript
I'm working with. We're talking about the scribe.
And the scribe is really noted here
for his distinctive G's,
something you do paleographically here
when you study medieval manuscripts is,
you look at the G's 'cause G's are where the scribes
always show off what they're doing with their hands.
And here we have these double-barreled
or figure eight kind of G's which are quite distinctive.
And so I was able to very quickly
go into the manuscript images that are in this collection
and pull out four examples of this
and just link them to this one highlight here.
So now when you roll over this all the G's pop up
and you don't have to go anywhere, you can just,
right there you get all these thumbnails
telling you exactly what's going on.
Likewise, this can work in terms of textual linking.
So in this project as well we've got this long bibliography
and of all these different scholarly sources.
And when I was writing commentary and annotations
about all this information,
every time I wanted to cite somebody
I put in the bibliographic information, the short reference,
so here, you can't see it, but says Jones 2001.
And then I said oh, so I made that a highlight
and then I linked it back to this main bibliography.
So I would just click on each of these examples
and link them back to this.
And what that means is, as you're doing this,
you're building something that's not simply a bibliography,
it's an index.
So every time now you roll over one of these references,
every single moment that that bibliographic source
gets cited is just available to you,
and you can go off and click it.
So it becomes just by simply the virtue of working in this
and creating links as you go,
a living referential index as well as a bibliography.
So likewise the DM projects resource
supports all sorts of Unicode characters,
so I'm showing you this now
because this is another side project I'm working on
with a few scholars in California.
This is the Franks casket,
a fascinating 8th century, or yeah,
8th century Northumbrian whalebone box
that has all these cool carved runes on it.
And so here you see the transcription of all these runes
as textual form, it's supporting all these
alternative characters to just Latin.
So if you're working in an Arabic text or Greek text,
all that stuff will work.
You can't really see it here in this
'cause of the lighting here
but I've also used the segmented line tool
to capture, to bound, all the moments of the runes
on this as one single object
that just meanders all over the place.
And the point there is you can connect
rather disparate moments on this image together
simply by yoking them together by carefully drawing around it
or by simply identifying two separate spaces
that you want to link to the same annotation
or link together as you go.
There's a full account management.
You can add users to this too,
so everyone can collaborate together on a single project,
so this is just the interface showing that.
Likewise, you can make, with a click of a button,
you can make all of this public.
On this interface here where you scroll up,
there's a little checkbox
that says make this this project publicly accessible.
When you click that box, you get this stable URL
that everybody can access
as a read-only version of the project.
So you can keep editing it and everything
but you can also just make it available
with a simple click of a button.
All right, so now things are going to go horribly wrong
because I'm going to try to do a live demo
of how this all works.
This is destined for failure,
I will say that at the beginning,
so then if it does happen to just work
I'll seem like a miracle worker.
So I'm gonna show you how easy it is to work in DM.
Oh yeah, before I do that I'm gonna just show you,
I've got I've got a couple of these up and live.
So here's what that desire
to work on the Cotton Map eventually became.
This was just published in April last month
along with the release of DM 1.0.
It's the Virtual Mappa project,
it is a collaboration with the British Library
and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies,
in which we have realized my original dream.
We have edited and annotated 11
early English maps of the world.
So they're all here, I've called up two of them
already for you.
And you can roll over every single--
There's Babylon, the thing that started it all.
So you can roll over it. There's your annotation.
You click on it and you get your baseline data,
the diplomatic transcription,
the normalized transcription, the English translation,
and any notes that you might want to have on it.
And the cool thing about this is certainly that's it great
'cause you can browse these maps and say what's this thing
and what is it and I can't read that hand,
and find out exactly what it is.
Oh here's a great example where you see
it's linking to this annotation but in another annotation
or actually a text describing, introducing this map,
it also is linked to as an example, so you see that it links to something,
but another document actually also references it.
So, and this is important, the links are actually bi-directional.
We're used to the idea of digital links
being unidirectional, you make a link
and you can take somewhere. It can't take you back.
And so the flexibility of linkage here
is a bit innovative as well.
But here's another thing.
As you're doing this, as you're building this,
you're creating again that relational database
that we originally saw in the 19th century Miller Edition.
So I could say of these 11 maps, let's pick something fun.
What was that? - Roma. - Roma!
OK great, so how many times
does Rome end up in these maps.
So here we are, we've got 19 results for Rome.
So you could now say, oh really,
I didn't know it was on the Sully Map.
And let's go take a look at that.
And we get the we get the annotation for it
and then we can go right here
and call up the exact moment
on the map that Roma is, so it can take you right there.
And again you're creating that all this
relational architecture simply by being able to
basically draw, click, point, and type.
- [Audience Member] What's the difference
between diplomatic and normalized transcription?
- Wow, I have a paleographic class for you to take.
The question was, what is the what is the difference
between a diplomatic transcription
and a normalized transcription?
Diplomatic transcription is the exact way it appears
in the manuscript, the exact way the scribe wrote it,
warts and all.
And the normalized transcription
is we sort of standardize it
so it's a little more familiar to modern eyes.
So if this scribe hadn't capitalized the R in Roma,
in the normalized transcription we'd capitalize it
'cause we're used to seeing cities with a capital.
Sometimes you might normalize
the difference between U and V in Latin,
where Latin scribes would just U for everything.
That gets a little weird looking at
if you're a modern viewer, you like your V's to be V's.
So we might we might change that. Okay.
And then to give you one other example
of how this goes way beyond maps already,
here's that project I was just talking about,
where I was showing you the scribe's G's.
What you're looking at here is two texts,
one in Latin and one and Old English,
and they are both versions of the same text.
I won't bore you with the details,
it's a really cool little text
on the allegorical significance of bells.
Because everything's an allegory in the Middle Ages.
And so this is all about bells.
And it comes over to England in this Latin form.
And then somebody about a hundred years later
translates it into Old English, and that's really cool.
We have the exact same text in Latin and Old English,
and indeed the Latin is corrupted,
there's all these grammatical mistakes in it.
And we know that the Old English scribe
was working with this exact text because we see them
trying to struggle with some grammatical infelicities
that are in that Latin text
as they are translating it into Old English.
So what DM allows me to do is to create something
that is hard to imagine in print.
I created a complete bilingual edition
in Latin and Old English of both of these texts
that have these crossover points
that allow you to enter in through one text
and come out on the other.
So for instance, here's the Latin manuscript.
There's a Latin transcription for all of it.
Ideally, you'd have a much bigger screen,
my laptop is scrunching this all down.
And then you have a Latin glossary.
And so here's like every single moment of Latin.
And so say you just want to study Latin.
You could come at this text and be like, I'm gonna learn these words.
And the glossary, you get all this grammar, and everything else.
You also the ability to easily in DM make externally links.
So this can take you right out to the Logeion database
for Greek and Latin and you can go right to the moment
and get a full deep dive into everything
you could possibly want to know about this word.
And that's the other thing, the point is,
you need to begin to create these resources
that are able to capitalize
on all the other existing resources out there.
We call that interoperability in new media theory.
The ability to make connections between these projects
and not simply always be siloed in like a book,
like just its own thing and not connected to anything else.
You'll notice here that at the bottom of this
it says Old English translation.
And so here's the Latin word, agare, third person--
Sorry, third declension infinitive form of "to drive"
or "to act" or "to do."
And we see here that the Old English translation of that,
which is to (speaking in foreign language), to do.
That moment here, if you roll over that,
it will take you right to that moment
in the Old English transcription or as well,
and if you link off to that and then you
go to the Old English transcription,
you would then be able to roll over anything
and likewise go right to that moment in the manuscript.
This is a horrible example to show you
'cause the first page of this
has actually been completely erased
so you can't see a fancy word there
because it's been reconstructed out of UV analysis.
We'll do one on the second page which is much friendlier
and gives you nice pretty thumbnails, there you go,
for that.
So that gives you some ideas of how DM works.
So now I'm gonna show you how this actually works.
Here's another project that we're hosting right here
at the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture,
in the I school.
And it's Old English Poetry in Facsimile,
an Open-Access Resource.
And basically this came about because,
about well, about six months ago now I was grading,
I was teaching a class in Old English
and I was grading all of the Old English finals
in this class.
And I had a graduate student in that class,
and I had said hey, you're gonna do more than just
do a standard translation of something,
you're gonna do an edition of an old English text
that you're interested in, so he picked a cool text.
And I was reading his edition
and he was citing, there was four manuscript variants,
and he was citing them, and I said, oh God,
I bet you these are all online right now.
And so they were, three out of four of them were,
and I was able to find them, and then I thought,
why do I have to spend 20 minutes looking at this?
The Old English poetic corpus is not that big.
There's at most like a hundred, no maybe 200 entries.
I thought you know what, I could use DM to begin to create
a complete corpus of every single piece
of Old English poetry surviving,
and link it directly to its specific manuscript witnesses,
in facsimile form that have survived.
And so that's what I'd begun to do.
So today I'm gonna add one of these
in front of your very eyes.
It's a poem called Maxims II.
It's a very short poem, here it is,
right here, Maxims II.
And it shows up in this British Library manuscript,
Cotton Tiberius B1.
So the first thing I'm going to do,
and I forgot to do this so I might have to,
is I'm gonna make a highlight.
This might give me an error.
No, it didn't, good, okay, so I'm gonna make a highlight.
Now I can do all sorts of things to this, 'cause it's live.
The next thing I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna add the manuscript image in.
I should point out,
here's where you can get the manuscript image,
here's Cotton Tiberius B1,
the British Library has been digitizing all these.
Here's the actual opening of the Cotton Tiberius B1
in extremely high resolution.
And there's a tool you can use to grab that image.
And the British Library is happy for you to grab that image.
And you can download a JPEG that is quite nice and large.
And so that's what I've done.
So this is a bit like a cooking show now
'cause I'm gonna just suddenly pull something else,
nice and neat, that I've already prepared.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna upload
the text of Maxims II to the project.
So I'm gonna choose a file.
This is again as easy as it is to do.
I'm going to-- Yeah, good, it's right there.
So, there it is. It's only two pages.
Folios 115 in recto and verso,
so I'm going to click on that and upload it.
I'm gonna say what I want to call it,
so we'll call it Maxims II.
You can't put colons in file names but you can in here,
so that should do it.
So we'll just upload that image right now.
And it takes about five seconds,
and then boom, there it is.
So here it is, we'll open that up.
And there it is.
So now it's in the project.
There it is, look at that, nice beautiful image.
We're gonna change the layout
so I can work a little more easily.
And the first thing we're gonna do
is we're gonna link this image
to that version of Maxims.
Now it's linked, so now when you go and you open this up
and you roll over, it'll take you right to it.
But here's the amazing thing.
So there's this great venerated collection,
edition of Old English poetry
that was printed in the '30s and '40s
called the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records.
Here's volume five, six, the minor poems.
And this is the one that holds Maxims II.
And when the Dictionary of Old English was being built,
which is still an ongoing project,
they created the corpus of Old English text.
They basically digitized every single existing moment
of Old English text, so they had it as data,
including the entire corpus
of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records.
And then somebody very smart came along
and converted it all to HTML
and identified all these different aspects
and then made it freely available,
and so now you have it just freely available online,
every single moment.
The next thing we will do is we will just grab this text,
which is the transcription of Maxims II,
and copy it and then we'll go back to our project.
And we'll say you know what,
let's now create a transcription of this,
we'll create a new annotation.
We'll change the layout to threefold now
so I can see what I'm doing,
and we'll just paste that in there, there it is.
We'll call this Maxims II,
ASPR edited text.
There it is. It's all ready to go.
Now we can begin to link things up.
So it begins on page 160, folio 165 V.
On folio 165 or 15, I can't remember now, let's see.
115, right, so folio 115 V.
Say you want to be able to jump off to exactly where this place starts.
Let's draw a little line here
to mark that this is where it starts.
Put that right there. We'll make this a highlight.
Boom.
We'll link the two up.
You click on this link button.
The next thing you clink on, forges a link,
watch you'll see link thing flash on here.
Boom, there it is.
Now you've got a link, so now when you roll over this
it will take you right to the opening of that moment.
So if we're looking at this image, we can--
Oh, this is a great thing, you can jump around here,
so we'll just go to the thumbnail and jump around,
and go right to the top of it, right there.
And we see the beginning of the next page is this word,
(speaking in foreign language),
so we'll take that, we'll make that there,
we'll go down and find (speaking in foreign language).
I believe it's on around 39, line 39 or so.
There it is, so we'll say there is Folio 115.
Yeah, so it's on this side, so it's a left, V.
So we'll make that, we'll do that.
We'll link that up.
And there, we've done it.
Now here's the last thing I'm gonna show you there,
and so that when you roll over this,
it's right there as well.
When you roll over Maxims II you get links
right to the transcription of the text
and the actual manuscript.
But here's the thing, here's the neat thing about this.
In the Old English you've got these words
that are bolded in this ASPR transcription,
and those are editorial emendations.
The guy that did the whole HTML thing
also went through and checked every time
that the editors of this book changed something,
and then made that bold so you could go find it.
So now, we have this amazing ability
to tag those exact moments,
with very little work.
And so we're gonna, I'm gonna change the layout
so I can more easily find this stuff.
But we're gonna go find that moment of that bolded word.
That word is (speaking in foreign language),
which means the most clear.
So we're gonna go and we're gonna look--
(audience laughing)
Right, it couldn't be clearer, right?
(speaking in foreign language)
So this is where I'm gonna get--
Oh, wait so first of all, I need to be on the first page,
so we'll go over here, see if we can find it.
I think it's somewhere.
So let's find out real quick what it's around
by scrolling up here.
(speaking in foreign language) Right.
Oh right, (speaking in foreign language), here it is.
So there it is,
and we see that it's not (speaking in foreign language),
if you know your Old English,
it's (speaking in foreign language), which means
(speaking in foreign language) means "most deceitful."
And this actual line is (speaking in foreign language),
which is truth, (speaking in foreign language).
So these are maxims, these are like Ben Franklin sayings.
And so this thing says truth is the most deceitful.
And so an editor was like, that doesn't make sense.
And so I'm gonna argue that the scribe
confused a C for a T there, because they actually
are quite similar, here's the T, kind of looks like a C.
And there's the C, so I'm gonna amend that and say
that it should be truth is the clearest,
that sounds much better.
There's a whole scholarly argument that,
no, it's actually supposed to be
(speaking in foreign language) was right
and it's supposed to be truth is the trickiest.
But we're not gonna get into that here.
But what we are gonna do is we're gonna tag that word,
boom, right like that.
We're gonna go back to our view here.
And we're just gonna make this a highlight.
And we're going to link it up
and now every time somebody accesses this
and they're like, oh, what's the inundation,
they don't even have to open this.
They just get the thumbnail and on a big screen
they'd be able to see exactly right there,
oh, that's (speaking in foreign language), not (speaking in foreign language),
and then they can go off and freak out and have arguments about it.
So that's my live-- So basically that's the live demo.
I'll show you one last thing 'cause I forgot
'cause it's so cool.
The way in which you can use these tools are really neat
and here's my favorite example from the Cotton Map.
To the north of Britain,
you've got these islands here.
You've got these islands here, right, and it's really cool.
They spell out 0-R-C-A-D-E-S-E-I-N-S-U-L-A
and they spell out (speaking in foreign language),
which is the Latin for the Orkney Islands,
and so I used the segment line tool
to trace the path of the words through the islands.
So you can do this with all sorts of things.
You could trace like
the path of a river through a map or you could trace,
let's say you have a collection of X-rays,
you could trace some sort of pathway
through something or music, your musical scores.
So let's now go back and I'll do my concluding statements
by going back to my slideshow.
Now, there it is.
There's the publicly accessible slide.
Something is weird going on with the loading thing.
So then we did the live demo.
And then I did the live demo and it worked.
I thought it was pretty courageous of me
to put that meme in there.
So just to really quickly cap up what's happening now.
1.0 was just released. 1.0 is really a prototype.
You can do all sorts of cool things in it
but it's extremely limited, it doesn't work well
with large-scale collections.
I wouldn't recommend using it
to work with more than five or six objects at a time
or texts at a time.
And so we have money from UW 2020
to a very generous fund to build 2.0.
And so that's exactly what's going on now.
Here's a screenshot of the prototype of 2.0.
It's gonna look a lot nicer than this that I got from the developer
in our weekly video call last week.
It's showing a couple of things.
First of all, it's showing a kind of ability to color code,
the different tags you might want to make
so you could begin to create a visual index
of the kind of information you're coding,
both on text and on image.
So sort of think about that.
You open up an object and everything blue
is an editorial emendation
and everything red is a mistake, you know.
You could begin to parse and eventually, we're gonna get to the point
where we want to be able to filter those so you could just click them on and off,
like you would layers and then the GIS document.
Also we're gonna have this sidebar here
to give a much more robust ability
to manage collections and sub collections.
So you'd be able to import like entire manuscripts
of like hundreds of pages in here
and organize them the way you want,
very quickly and efficiently.
Likewise, this is something
that's very important to talk about 'cause it's about these initiatives
to allow resources to play well with other resources.
There's a huge initiative going on right now
in the digitization world called IIIF,
or I can't remember what that I's stand for.
I-I-I, it's International Image Interoperability Framework
or something.
I think that might be it. IIIF.
And it's just, it's a standard,
it's a protocol and everyone's beginning
to build these tools, so if something is in IIIF,
you can do all sorts of things with it.
In this case, this is a repository
from Corpus Christi College Cambridge Library, the Parker Library,
which has 25% of all surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts,
so it's very dear to my heart.
And they just made their entire digitized repository
open access, public successful, and IIIF compliant,
which means you can grab,
if you're looking at this image, you can grab this little logo
and dump it into an IIIF compliant resource
and it will just open it up and you can begin to do things with it,
and so that's what we're also what we're doing in 2.0
is we're gonna make this IIIF compliant,
so not only will you be able to work with your local files,
like I just did today, but you will now be able to on-the-fly
be able to consume and work with all the resources
that are out there
that are adhering to this standard and protocol, as well.
And then finally we are currently in
the grant funding cycle for 3.0
where I've got a deadline in 2-3 weeks
for a big NEH grant that we're gonna go for.
And which we're gonna do a couple of new things
that bring us back, all the way back to this picture
of this book that we started with.
Those are the stacks of the library that we started with.
We're gonna want to be able to manifest exports in IIIF.
That means if you assemble a collection of images
in Digital Mappa, or DM 3.0,
you would be able to then publish that manifest
and then anybody else could grab that manifest
and just take all your images and begin to work with them
in a different way, if you wanted, right.
Secondly, remember those images and tags and things?
What we want to do in 3.0, we're already building it in 2.0,
we just don't have the money to make it happen,
is every single one of those times you make a target
and you hang some information offer, you make an annotation,
each of those is generating its own unique URL.
So what you'll be able to do in academic publishing,
and this is where we get back to the idea of logic
and the new logics, every time you do that,
you can then make that moment a target
for other published scholarship that is digital,
so you were really interested in what I did
with the Orkney Islands, and you're writing an article
about representation of islands,
and in maps and you want to cite that,
you would be able to just copy the URL
and put it in your own online publication
and it would take you right to that moment
in the virtual map, a project and open it up for you.
So you have that granular citation allottee
that really is realizing the potential
of interconnecting all the kinds of scholarship
that we're doing, right?
True multi-user capability.
I won't bore you with that
but right now it's like you can have multiple users
in our project but if you're both editing
the same exact thing at the same time,
someone's gonna win and someone's gonna lose.
And then finally and this is the thing I'm most excited
about actually, one-click deployment
for what I call seed projects.
Right now deploying DM is rather arduous.
You need a network admin
who knows what he's doing or she's doing
and you need to execute these shell scripts
and do all this kind of stuff that's beyond me,
and what we want to do, of course, is big.
I want to use DM, click.
You know, now I'm using DM
and so with that, though, you then would have the ability
to take seed projects, so say you have that example
of the Old English facsimile,
Poetry Impacts Only project that I was using,
that's gonna, it's just basic, right?
It's just the text and the image
and a few pointers to locate yourself, and that's it.
Say you had that, great, I'm teaching
a class in Old English,
I'm gonna set my students loose on this.
You would be able to take that as a seed project,
deploy it on your own, add all your students to the project.
Give them all their own accounts
and then assign different things to do it.
I didn't show this because I didn't get permission
from the students to show it, but in the iSchool this year,
Heather Wacha, who's as our postdoc fellow working on this,
taught a class in the history of the book
and she used DM to have students
go to all these different digital repositories
of medieval manuscripts and write reviews,
which they all did in DM and then they all were able
to reference each other's reviews.
They all read each other's reviews
and tagged each other in them,
and linking back and forth about points they made,
and so you had this final project
that was this collaborative final project
of reviews of 15 different manuscript repositories,
all sort of talking with each other
and linking and and referencing it.
And that's just one example of how this
can be used in the classroom, as well.
And so a couple of last things.
Finally, you can actually go and try out DM for yourself.
It's not exciting. You get there, you upload an image.
You click on it a little bit, and you say,
"Oh, it did just what Martin Foys said it was going to do."
But you can do it at sandbox.digitalmappa.org
and if you are interested, and this is not just for the humanities.
Could be for the sciences.
We're very interested in this idea of being a way
for anybody to begin to publish information,
present information in new ways.
At UW, we have what we call a DM at UW.
It's part of the mission of the UW 2020 grant
and so we're on call, me and Heather Wacha and Max Gray
and a few other of our graduate assistants,
our jobs would be project managers
and to help you get started in this
and you can go right to the Center for the History of Print
and Digital Culture at that very long--
[chuckles]
I have to create a Tiny URL for that very long URL.
and everything you might want to know will be found there.
I should just note there's also a link to this
on just the very simple DigitalMappa.org,
just go under the little button that says UW
and you'll be able find it.
And that is all I have to say about all this.
Thank you very much.
[audience applauding]