The Sapheos Project: Transparency in Multi-image Collation, Analysis, and Representation

FAIN: HD-50880-09

University of South Carolina Research Foundation (Columbia, SC 29208-0001)
Randall Cream (Project Director: April 2009 to September 2010)
Jennifer E. Guiliano (Project Director: September 2010 to February 2012)

Development of an online collation tool to allow for analysis and display of multiple page images along with software that identifies and links to specific points, letters, words, and images on the page.

Our proposal for a Level II Start-Up grant for the Sapheos project seeks to develop innovative software to analyze, represent, and collate images in the humanities. While there are an array of text based digital projects underway that offer increasingly powerful tools for marking up, analyzing, and visualizing textual data in the humanities, image-based analysis has not received similar attention. From the project's inception, our aim has been to develop extensible open-source software that researchers across the humanities can use to link image to text in a discrete, granular fashion. Working with the NEH-funded Spenser Project, a multi-institutional Scholarly Editions project, we're developing two significant image-based software tools: (a) digital collation software that builds on and extends the work of optical methods, using transparency to "stack" and collate multiple copies, and (b) software for automatically sectioning and identifying (x,y) coordinate pairs for images.