Software for Humanities Computing: Image Annotation, Unicode, and SGML packages from the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities

The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia supports computer-mediated research projects in all disciplines of the humanities. In the service of these projects, we do some software development. In this session, John Unsworth, Director of the Institute, will demonstrate some of the software pack-ages publicly available or under development at the Institute. Those packages include:

Inote: an image annotation program, written in Java. Inote allows a user to superimpose multiple clear overlays on an image and, without altering the underlying image, draw details (point, circle, rectangle) on those overlays and attach annotations (text or image) to the detail. It can load images by http, and it can be delivered, along with an annotated image, through the web. Inote also has some special features including automatic overlay generation, in which the software identifies lines of text in a page image and automatically creates details for those lines. Inote will also save overlays as client-side ismap instructions. Planned features include audio annotations and SGML awareness.

MU: a perl-based program that will build fill-out forms for SGML editing through the web, using a simple template of SGML tags as the basis for the form. MU supports file-locking (for collaborative work over the net), allows one to save and reload files as they are being edited, provides space for notes and remarks, and automatically builds a selectable list of SGML files in progress.

Babble: a Unicode-based program that permits synoptic display of many texts in many different character sets. Babble respects the directionality of different languages in text-wrapping, allows text display columns to be vertical or horizontal, permits selective scroll-locking of text columns, and performs string and mark searches. This software, currently written in Motif and C++, is being ported to Java, and we expect the Java version to be SGML-aware.