Interface Development for Static Multimedia Documents

FAIN: HD-50236-07

Duke University (Durham, NC 27705-4677)
Matt Cohen (Project Director: April 2007 to May 2009)

A project to create standards/practices and software for marking up and representing "static multimedia documents," especially marginalia and annotations in printed texts.

We propose to create a set of software technologies and encoding practices that will allow for the encoding, displaying, and searching of static documents that mix print, manuscript, and visual images--documents such as printed texts or images bearing handwritten annotations. The technologies we plan to build include standards for encoding coordinates in XML transcriptions so that search engines can visually display results of user searches for manuscript words and phrases; software for linking XML editing programs to an image display to allow encoders to relate bitmap images to XML text; and model stylesheets capable of displaying transcriptions of annotated documents together with digital images of those documents. The goal will be to create a software suite that is simple enough to be used by transcribers with little familiarity with information encoding and portable enough to work in multiple computing environments for widely different kinds of archival projects.