Workshop on Electronic Texts · Library of Congress
SESSION II
Elli MYLONAS The Perseus Project: Interactive Sources and Studies in Classical Greece The Perseus Project (5) has just released Perseus 1.0, the first publicly available version of its hypertextual database of multimedia materials on classical Greece. Perseus is designed to be used by a wide audience, comprised of readers at the student and scholar levels. As such, it must be able to locate information using different strategies, and it must contain enough detail to serve the different needs of its users. In addition, it must be delivered so that it is affordable to its target audience. [These problems and the solutions we chose are described in Mylonas, "An Interface to Classical Greek Civilization," JASIS 43:2, March 1992.] In order to achieve its objective, the project staff decided to make a conscious separation between selecting and converting textual, database, and image data on the one hand, and putting it into a delivery system on the other. That way, it is possible to create the electronic data without thinking about the restrictions of the delivery system. We have made a great effort to choose system-independent formats for our data, and to put as much thought and work as possible into structuring it so that the translation from paper to electronic form will enhance the value of the data. [A discussion of these solutions as of two years ago is in Elli Mylonas, Gregory Crane, Kenneth Morrell, and D. Neel Smith, "The Perseus Project: Data in the Electronic Age," in Accessing Antiquity: The Computerization of Classical Databases, J. Solomon and T. Worthen (eds.), University of Arizona Press, in press.]
Much of the work on Perseus is focused on collecting and converting the data on which the project is based. At the same time, it is necessary to provide means of access to the information, in order to make it usable, and them to investigate how it is used. As we learn more about what students and scholars from different backgrounds do with Perseus, we can adjust our data collection, and also modify the system to accommodate them. In creating a delivery system for general use, we have tried to avoid favoring any one type of use by allowing multiple forms of access to and navigation through the system. The way text is handled exemplifies some of these principles. All text in Perseus is tagged using SGML, following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). This markup is used to index the text, and process it so that it can be imported into HyperCard. No SGML markup remains in the text that reaches the user, because currently it would be too expensive to create a system that acts on SGML in real time. However, the regularity provided by SGML is essential for verifying the content of the texts, and greatly speeds all the processing performed on them. The fact that the texts exist in SGML ensures that they will be relatively easy to port to different hardware and software, and so will outlast the current delivery platform. Finally, the SGML markup incorporates existing canonical reference systems (chapter, verse, line, etc.); indexing and navigation are based on these features. This ensures that the same canonical reference will always resolve to the same point within a text, and that all versions of our texts, regardless of delivery platform (even paper printouts) will function the same way.
In order to provide tools for users, the text is processed by a morphological analyzer, and the results are stored in a database. Together with the index, the Greek-English Lexicon, and the index of all the English words in the definitions of the lexicon, the morphological analyses comprise a set of linguistic tools that allow users of all levels to work with the textual information, and to accomplish different tasks. For example, students who read no Greek may explore a concept as it appears in Greek texts by using the English-Greek index, and then looking up works in the texts and translations, or scholars may do detailed morphological studies of word use by using the morphological analyses of the texts. Because these tools were not designed for any one use, the same tools and the same data can be used by both students and scholars. NOTES: (5) Perseus is based at Harvard University, with collaborators at several other universities. The project has been funded primarily by the Annenberg/CPB Project, as well as by Harvard University, Apple Computer, and others. It is published by Yale University Press. Perseus runs on Macintosh computers, under the HyperCard program. Eric CALALUCA Chadwyck-Healey embarked last year on two distinct yet related full-text humanities database projects. The English Poetry Full-Text Database and the Patrologia Latina Database represent new approaches to linguistic research resources. The size and complexity of the projects present problems for electronic publishers, but surmountable ones if they remain abreast of the latest possibilities in data capture and retrieval software techniques.
In spring 1988 the editors of the papers of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin were approached by classics scholar David Packard on behalf of the Packard Humanities Foundation with a proposal to produce a CD-ROM edition of the complete papers of each of the Founding Fathers. This electronic edition will supplement the published volumes, making the documents widely available to students and researchers at reasonable cost. We estimate that our CD-ROM edition of Washington's Papers will be substantially completed within the next two years and ready for publication. Within the next ten years or so, similar CD-ROM editions of the Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison papers also will be available. At the Library of Congress's session on technology, I would like to discuss not only the experience of the Washington Papers in producing the CD-ROM edition, but the impact technology has had on these major editorial projects. Already, we are editing our volumes with an eye to the material that will be readily available in the CD-ROM edition. The completed electronic edition will provide immense possibilities for the searching of documents for information in a way never possible before. The kind of technical innovations that are currently available and on the drawing board will soon revolutionize historical research and the production of historical documents. Unfortunately, much of this new technology is not being used in the planning stages of historical projects, simply because many historians are aware only in the vaguest way of its existence. At least two major new historical editing projects are considering microfilm editions, simply because they are not aware of the possibilities of electronic alternatives and the advantages of the new technology in terms of flexibility and research potential compared to microfilm. In fact, too many of us in history and literature are still at the stage of struggling with our PCs. There are many historical editorial projects in progress presently, and an equal number of literary projects. While the two fields have somewhat different approaches to textual editing, there are ways in which electronic technology can be of service to both.
Since few of the editors involved in the Founding Fathers CD-ROM editions are technical experts in any sense, I hope to point out in my discussion of our experience how many of these electronic innovations can be used successfully by scholars who are novices in the world of new technology. One of the major concerns of the sponsors of the multitude of new scholarly editions is the limited audience reached by the published volumes. Most of these editions are being published in small quantities and the publishers' price for them puts them out of the reach not only of individual scholars but of most public libraries and all but the largest educational institutions. However, little attention is being given to ways in which technology can bypass conventional publication to make historical and literary documents more widely available. What attracted us most to the CD-ROM edition of The Papers of George Washington was the fact that David Packard's aim was to make a complete edition of all of the 135,000 documents we have collected available in an inexpensive format that would be placed in public libraries, small colleges, and even high schools. This would provide an audience far beyond our present 1,000-copy, $45 published edition. Since the CD-ROM edition will carry none of the explanatory annotation that appears in the published volumes, we also feel that the use of the CD-ROM will lead many researchers to seek out the published volumes.
In addition to ignorance of new technical advances, I have found that too many editors--and historians and literary scholars--are resistant and even hostile to suggestions that electronic technology may enhance their work. I intend to discuss some of the arguments traditionalists are advancing to resist technology, ranging from distrust of the speed with which it changes (we are already wondering what is out there that is better than CD-ROM) to suspicion of the technical language used to describe electronic developments. Maria LEBRON The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, a joint venture of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), is the first peer-reviewed journal to provide full text, tabular material, and line illustrations on line. This presentation will discuss the genesis and start-up period of the journal. Topics of discussion will include historical overview, day-to-day management of the editorial peer review, and manuscript tagging and publication. A demonstration of the journal and its features will accompany the presentation. Lynne PERSONIUS Cornell University Library, Cornell Information Technologies, and Xerox Corporation, with the support of the Commission on Preservation and Access, and Sun Microsystems, Inc., have been collaborating in a project to test a prototype system for recording brittle books as digital images and producing, on demand, high-quality archival paper replacements. The project goes beyond that, however, to investigate some of the issues surrounding scanning, storing, retrieving, and providing access to digital images in a network environment.
The Joint Study in Digital Preservation began in January 1990. Xerox provided the College Library Access and Storage System (CLASS) software, a prototype 600-dots-per-inch (dpi) scanner, and the hardware necessary to support network printing on the DocuTech printer housed in Cornell's Computing and Communications Center (CCC). The Cornell staff using the hardware and software became an integral part of the development and testing process for enhancements to the CLASS software system. The collaborative nature of this relationship is resulting in a system that is specifically tailored to the preservation application. A digital library of 1,000 volumes (or approximately 300,000 images) has been created and is stored on an optical jukebox that resides in CCC. The library includes a collection of select mathematics monographs that provides mathematics faculty with an opportunity to use the electronic library. The remaining volumes were chosen for the library to test the various capabilities of the scanning system. One project objective is to provide users of the Cornell library and the library staff with the ability to request facsimiles of digitized images or to retrieve the actual electronic image for browsing. A prototype viewing workstation has been created by Xerox, with input into the design by a committee of Cornell librarians and computer professionals. This will allow us to experiment with patron access to the images that make up the digital library. The viewing station provides search, retrieval, and (ultimately) printing functions with enhancements to facilitate navigation through multiple documents.
Cornell currently is working to extend access to the digital library to readers using workstations from their offices. This year is devoted to the development of a network resident image conversion and delivery server, and client software that will support readers who use Apple Macintosh computers, IBM windows platforms, and Sun workstations. Equipment for this development was provided by Sun Microsystems with support from the Commission on Preservation and Access. During the show-and-tell session of the Workshop on Electronic Texts, a prototype view station will be demonstrated. In addition, a display of original library books that have been digitized will be available for review with associated printed copies for comparison. The fifteen-minute overview of the project will include a slide presentation that constitutes a "tour" of the preservation digitizing process. The final network-connected version of the viewing station will provide library users with another mechanism for accessing the digital library, and will also provide the capability of viewing images directly. This will not require special software, although a powerful computer with good graphics will be needed. The Joint Study in Digital Preservation has generated a great deal of interest in the library community. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, this project serves to raise a vast number of other issues surrounding the use of digital technology for the preservation and use of deteriorating library materials, which subsequent projects will need to examine. Much work remains.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.