University Place

The Digital Mappa Project

[Tom Zinnen, Outreach Specialist, Biotechnology Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, I’m Tom Zinnen and I work here at the U.W.-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for U.W.-Extension, Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the U.W.-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 Hull 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.

[laughter]

Yeah, must be the ice-fishing.

[laughter]

He came here to U.W.-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, its the Digital Mappa project. Please welcome – please join me in welcoming Martin Foys to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.

[applause]

[Martin Foys, Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Thank you, Tom.

Thank you.

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 – I didn’t realize it was the day before grades are due.

[laughter]

And so, this is gonna be a rather extemporaneous talk, I – I hope everyone’s kinda okay with that.

[slide titled, Digital Mappa, featuring a screenshot of the Digital Mappa 1.0 website]

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 – and – and peruse, and almost everything I’m talking about in terms of the resource I’m – Im presenting and its – its potential and power is kinda packed into this – into this – into this website.

[Martin Foys]

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 – the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and right now, I’m very grateful to the – to the W.A.R.F. Foundation here at U.W. for our current U.W. 2020 grant, which is funding a lot of this initial or current work. Okay.

So – also, if you are so inclined you can scurry on over to –

[slide titled, Twitter – @DigitalMappa, featuring a screenshot of the Digital Mappas twitter page]

– 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.

[laughter]

[new slide titled, What is DigitalMappa? (The short take), featuring two points – one, if you are not already affiliated with a DigitalMappa server, have a network administrator set up your own instance of it – assembly required and two, start making your own DigitalMappa workspaces, collaborations, projects and open access scholarly publications for collections of images and text – if you can click, type, copy & paste, you can use DigitalMappa]

So, here’s the very, very, quick take, the executive – executive summary of what I’m going to be talking about today. The D.M. project, short for Digital Mappa, is essentially a resource that allows any individual to make their own D.H., 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 –

[Martin Foys]

– in the humanities, to produce a digital project, something that is sophisticated in its digital entity and – 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.

[laughter]

I will – 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 it. 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 kinda 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 D.M. 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 – 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 – a resource like this.

[slide featuring a photo of an aisle of stacks in a library with shelves full of books]

So, what I’m showing you here is a picture of library stacks, right? Here’s the deal, library stacks are the way in which we currently, still, constrain the data of the past through scholarly inquiry, right? The way in which all that stuff we have that has survived from the past, that has been kinda 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 – of – of – of specialties and methodological tools and insights, and then they produce essays and monographs and books. And that is the way in which –

[Martin Foys]

– you constrain this data into something that is usable. And for, you know, hundreds of years that’s the way we have done it, right? So, just sort of remember that.

And the second thing I want to show you is, this is a – you can’t see him in this here because hes – hes – it’s his Twitter account –

[slide featuring a screenshot of the Twitter account webpage of William Noel with a tweet from Mr. Noel superimposed upon it with the quote – The value of a material artifact is what it is. The value of a digital image is what you can do with it.]

-but it’s sort of hidden now. This is Will Noel, who used to be the – 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 – hes, in the kind of Christian paradigm, he’s, like, hes achieved blessed status in the – in – in the digital humanities. And this is one of his recent tweets, or a couple years ago now that really kind of 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 –

[Martin Foys]

– everything we have preserved from the past. And that’s kind of interesting in and of itself, because what that allows is better access. If you have online capability, you can generally get now – get to so many things that 20 to 30 years ago just were simply inaccessible unless you were able to access them as – as a physical object. So that’s good, but we can’t stop there, right?

Theres – the idea is that new – with new technologies, it brings with it new logics, new ways to work, new – new ways to produce scholarly inquiry and production, right? 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 – hes from quite, quite a while ago now.

[slide featuring a small inset photo of Vanaver Bush at his desk and the quote from his 1945 essay, As We May Think, The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same a was used in the days of square-rigged ships.]

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 kind of serve up all sorts of archival data for – for study and for linking together, and, you know, a real sort of visionary. And what he said in 1945 when I read this years ago in graduate school, it always stuck with me, right?

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 –

[Martin Foys]

– the ideas of the human experience. And even in the ’40s he was saying information is growing so – so prodigiously, we need new ways to constrain the data. Right?

So, this gets us to the idea of elect – of electronic publishing or digital publishing. And I – I kind of love this little image here –

[slide titled, Electronic Publishing, featuring an old article with an illustration of a computer monitor defining Electronic Publishing (also referred to as ePublishing or digital publishing) as including the digital publishing of e-books, EPUBs and electronic articles and the distribution of written-information digitally through CD-ROMs, DVDs, portable document files (PDF), or online over the internet or other networks. Additionally, there is a GIF of Samuel Jacksons character from The Matrix and the phrase What if I told you youre not doing it right as an inset photo in the upper left]

– from this – from this very well-meaning slideshow about introduction of electronic publishing. You know, it’s a flat screen monitor that is essentially producing, like, a bunch of antiquated books and reproducing them on the screen. And it sort of 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 a kind of an important idea here which is the notion of remediation, right? Remediation is this theory from Media Studies, which is, when a new technology comes along –

[Martin Foys]

– it brings with it a kind of 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 kinda think about back to say, some of you may remember this, the – the – when television kinda first came on the scene back in the 50s and – ’40s and ’50s and ’60s. What it did for a couple of – a couple of decades is it simply replicated the idea of theater. You had a single camera, and it was just sort of 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 – and such, so it’s a – its a – its a reciprocal, symbiotic kind of relationship.

So, with regards to electronic publishing, we now have digital publishing, we now have kinda 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 kinda a classic case. It is – it is way more than literally putting the books on the screen, as this image kinda suggests. And this gets us to what is valuable about the D.M. resource that we’re beginning to develop.

So, what I’m gonna do for you now is give you a very quick kinda backstory for how I got here, right?

So, in the late 1990s, essentially, for my field, in terms of digital humanities, the – the – 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 –

[slide featuring a screenshot The Bayeux Tapestry online and CD-ROM website order page as well as a screenshot of some of the contents of The Bayeux Tapestry online]

– 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 kinda survived 900 years. I’m – Im holding out, right? I was born in 1968, so if I can make it to 98 –

[Martin Foys]

– I will live to the millennium celebration of – of – of 1066 and the Norman Conquest. So, we’ll see how it goes.

[laughter]

So – so, this is it, and it think it was first – 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 – this – this was.

So, it was exciting and fun, and it really kinda 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 – the Bayeux Tapestry is that it, you know, its a 230-foot-long scroll. And so, I was able to reassemble it digitally so you could scroll it past you as a viewer as you were – as you were viewing it. And so, kind of preserving, yet reversing the relationship of the object to the viewer. And when you go to La Centre Guillaume-le-Conquerant in – in – in Bayeux, in Normandy, you have to walk yourself past the object and now instead, you move the object past you. But it kinda preserved that, the continuity of that object in a way that books just simply could not; books must break this object apart. And so – so, that – that – that was epiphanic for me, eye opening. To say, Wow, digital technology can – can – can do things that we can’t do in the older forms of media.

And so, I’m a – Im a man of little imagination, and when I have an idea, I kinda just hold onto it jealously and never let go of it and keep – and keep working on it. So, when I – when I finished all of that and got it published and – and – 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 is, like, what is it? Is it history? Is it art? It’s got text in it in Latin. Is it – is it kinda a literary account, like? There’s all ways that you can come at it. And so, that brought me to maps. And this is – what you’re looking at here is the Cotton Anglo-Saxon Map of the World from the late –

[slide titled, Origins, featuring an image of the above-mentioned Cotton Anglo-Saxon Map of the World]

– 10th or early 11th century. And it’s the first detailed, descriptive, detailed, English medieval map of – in existence, or map in existence, I guess, of the world. And it’s really kinda fascinating, you might have trouble orienting yourself to this because it actually has true orientation. East is up here –

[uses mouse pointer to indicate the top of the map]

– at the top. So, this is North –

[uses mouse pointer to indicate the left-hand side of the map]

– so, you have to turn your head to begin, alright just like that, to look at it. Here’s England down here.

[uses mouse pointer to indicate the lower left of the map]

Here’s the Mediterranean.

[uses the mouse pointer to indicate the lower middle of the map]

That’s Italy, there’s Rome right there.

[uses mouse pointer to indicate area slightly left of middle center on the map]

So, there’s Britain, there’s Ireland.

[uses mouse pointer to indicate the lower left corner of the map]

Even all the way out here is Thule, Ultimate Thule, right?

[uses mouse pointer to indicate the far lower left corner of the map]

Perhaps Iceland or something out.

[audience member]

Greenland, most likely.

[Martin Foys]

Yes, perhaps even Greenland.

Thats an – Ultimate Thule was often meant to – is often taken to represent Greenland there, although Iceland does peskily get in between those – those – 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 digital mappa mundi – or the – the – the – the Bayeux Tapestry. Because remember, I’m a man of small imagination. So – so, this – this turned out to be rather complicated. The – the – the reason being –

[Martin Foys]

– is that the Cotton Mappa Mundi, Cotton Map, is – its 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 – near England, Britain, and – and Scandinavia.

And so, for – for instance here, and it’s – its got a lot of relationships to other texts and then other maps that contain the same amount of data. So, here’s Konrad Miller’s –

[slide featuring an illustration of the Cotton Map in Konrad Millers Mappaemundi – Die altesten Weltkarten from 1895]

– 1895 edition of this map from the Die altesten Weltkarten, 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 – hes 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 kinda ties in. And what he’s essentially doing there is creating on paper in the 19th century a relational database, right? He’s trying – hes trying to see how do these things all kinda fit together and tie into each other, how do they all intersect? Yet he’s doing it in a rather – in the rather limiting form of print, the print media. And so, I thought, Great! This is – I’m gonna take this –

[Martin Foys]

- and I’ll be able to do this for medieval world maps and/or the Cotton Map specifically.

And so, this is a very early Mellon-funded project called E.P.P.T. –

[slide featuring a screenshot of the Electronic Presentation and Production Technology software interface]

– 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, like, 2003, 2004. And I was using XML, at the time a kind of hot new technology for how you would mark up and encode information online.

And -and so, you can just see here I was able to kinda create a bounding box around Babylonia.

[uses mouse pointer to indicate the bounding box in the software interface screenshot]

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 –

[uses mouse pointer to indicate the bottom of the program screenshot]

– 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 –

[Martin Foys]

- was – would serve editions of all these other maps that shared its kind of information. And so, what kind of 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, right? And so, that gets – that got me finally to Digital Mappa Mundi, which it is called that, called the D.M. 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 Digital – of the D.M. project.

[slide with a series of screen shots of how the Digital Mappa project works – featuring a screenshot of a portion of the Cotton Map with a section of it surrounded by a bounding box and a second screenshot showing the information that that is tied to that bounding box]

And its – Ive – I – I’m using it in connection to the Cotton Map here, so the – the – 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 –

[Martin Foys]

– if there’s a picture of somebody and you want to tag somebody’s face and then you can hang – hang some information off it, you can say, Oh, that’s Tom, you know, riding in his new Tesla. Isn’t this a nice kinda – kinda picture? That’s essentially what D.M. does but on a vaster, more – 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 –

[return to the previous slide with the screenshots showing how the D.M. project works]

– moments on images and on texts in the exact same way. Like, you can draw a box or shape around a – a bit of an – 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 kind of very powerful structure, architecture for – for – for – for information and – and – 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 –

[Martin Foys]

– 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 – and type things.

Here’s your kind tools up here.

[return to the previous slide and uses the mouse pointer to indicate the tools palette on the screenshot]

Lines, circles, segmented lines, squares, circles, and polygonal ways in which to – to draw shapes around the area of interest that you want to work with on the images.

[new slide showing a new screenshot of the D.M. interface as it appears to the user with an inset box showing the information upon which a user has clicked]

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 a lot – almost everything you’re gonna see is medieval. Because I’m a medievalist and – 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, right? It doesn’t care what objects –

[Martin Foys]

– and text it’s looking at. So, please from the beginning don’t – dont 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 D>M. There’s – theres no, it doesn’t check for the age of the – 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 –

[return to the previous slide with the screenshot of the user interface]

– 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 – what theyre 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 – and – and just link them to this – 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.

[new slide showing the process of textual linking with screenshot of six different text entries and showing how one highlight chosen by the user is linked to all these texts which is indicated by red arrows going from the original highlight to words in all six text entries to which that highlight is linked]

Likewise, this can work in terms of textual linking, right? So, in this project as well we’ve got this long bibliography, right? 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 – the short reference, so here, you kinda can’t see it, but says Jones 2001. And – 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 –

[Martin Foy]

– just by simple – simply the virtue of working in this and creating links as you go, a – a – a living referential index as well as a bibliography.

So – likewise, the D.M. project’s resource supports all sorts of Unicode characters, so I’m showing you this now because this is another –

[slide featuring two screenshots from the D.M. project – one of an ancient whalebone box with illustrations and runes on it and a second of a text document explaining how to read the runic inscriptions]

– side project I’m working on with a few scholars in – in California. This is the Franks casket, a fascinating 8th century, or maybe, yeah, 8th century Northumbrian whalebone box that has all these kinda 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 kinda an Arabic text or Greek text, all that stuff will work. And you can’t really see it here in this ’cause – ’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 kinda meanders all over the place.

[uses mouse pointer to circle and follow the flow of the bounding box that has been created on the photo of the whalebone casket]

And the kinda point there is you can connect rather disparate moments on this image together –

[Martin Foys]

– simply by yoking them together by carefully drawing around it or by simply identifying two – 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 they can – everyone can kinda collaborate together on a – on a single project, so this is just the interface showing that.

[slide showing a screenshot of the account tools of the Digital Mappa project – showing users and a table with checkmarks of who is allow to see, modify and administrate the piece of information on which collaborators are working]

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, they’ll be – they’ll be – there’s a little checkbox that says make this – make this project publicly accessible. When you click that box, you get this stable U.R.L. that everybody –

[Martin Foy]

– 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. Alright.

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 – I will say that at the beginning, so then if it does happen to just work, I’ll seem like a miracle worker. Okay.

So, I’m gonna show you how easy it is to work in D.M.

Oh! Yeah, before I do that, I’m gonna just show you, I’ve got – I’ve got I’ve got a couple of these up and live.

[slide featuring two live screen digital images from the Digital Mappa project, on the left is a section of the Cotton Map and on the right is a portion of the Psalter World Map]

So, here’s the – heres what that desire to work on the Cotton Map eventually became. Its – this was just published in April last month along with the release of D.M. 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.

[Mr. Foys clicks on the Virtual Mappa link on the website which brings up a smaller Virtual Mappa window in which are several maps that can be opened and manipulated]

We have edited and annotated 11 maps of – early English maps of the world, right? So, they’re all here, I’ve called up two of them already for you.

[return to the window with the two smaller windows with the Cotton Map and the Psalter World Map]

And you can roll over every single – theres our – theres our – there’s Babylon –

[clicks on the bounding box on the Cotton Map of Babylon bringing up a smaller text window showing the text links to that part of the image]

– the thing that started it all, right? So, you can roll over it. And there it is, theres your annotation.

[places mouse over the text link in the smaller text window and clicks]

You click on it –

[a new window pops open that has the Diplomatic transcription, the normalized transcription, the English translation, and notes about the image]

– and you get your baseline data, the diplomatic transcription, the normal – normalized transcription, the English translation, and any notes that you might want to – to have on it. And the cool thing about this –

[closes the transcription and notes window]

– is certainly that’s it great ’cause you can browse –

[uses mouse to zoom in on the Psalter World Map within that window]

– these maps and say, What’s this thing? and What is it? and I can’t read that hand –

[clicks on a bounding box on the Psalter World Map and brings up a new text window for that object]

– 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 kinda important, the links are actually bi-directional. We’re – were used to the idea of –

[Martin Foys]

– digital links being unidirectional, you make a link, and you can take somewhere, but you cant – it can’t take you back. And so, another kind of – the kind of – linking flexibility – the flexibility of linkage here is – is – is a bit innovative as well.

But here’s another thing.

[return to the live demo, with the two windows with the Cotton Map and Psalter World Map open]

As you’re doing this –

[clicks on the Search button within the Digital Mappa project bringing up a Search window]

– as you’re building this, you’re creating again that relational database that we originally saw in the 19th century Miller – Miller Edition. So, I could say of these 11 maps, let’s pick something fun.
[Audience member, off screen]

Roma.

[Martin Foys, off screen]

What was that?

[Audience member, off screen]

Roma.

[Martin Foys, off screen]

Roma! OK great! How many times does Rome end up in – in –

[types the word Rome in the search box in the Search window]

– in – in these maps?

[the Search window populates with 19 instances of Rome across the 11 maps]

So, here we are, we’ve got 19 results for Rome.

[scrolls through the results in the window]

So, you could now say, Oh really, I didn’t know it was on the Sawley Map. And let’s go – lets go take a look at that.

[clicks on the Sawley Map search results and that opens up a text box from the Mappa project that has the Diplomatic transcription, the Normalized transcription, the English translation, and the notes for Roma on the Sawley Map]

And we get the – we get the annotation for it and then we can go right here –

[clicks on the map link in the text box that brings up the map image in a new window with Roma in a bounding box in the center of the image]

– 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 kinda relational architecture simply by being able to basically draw, click, point, and type.

[Audience Member, off screen]

What’s the difference between diplomatic and normalized transcription?

[Martin Foys, on camera]

Wow! I have a paleographic class for you to take. The question was, What is the – the – what is the – what is the difference between a diplomatic transcription and a normalized transcription? Diplomatic transcription is the exact way it appears on the – on – on – in the manuscript, the – 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.

[Audience member]

Right.

[Martin Foys]

Sometimes you might normalize the difference between U and V in Latin, where, you know, a Latin scribes would – would just U for everything. That gets a little weird looking at if you’re a modern viewer, you like your – you like your V’s to be V’s. So, we might – we might change that, right? Okay.

So, and then to give you one other example –

[return to the live demo of the Digital Mappa project, now with six smaller windows open on the screen, (top window row, left to right), a Latin manuscript with the words underlined, the Latin transcription typed and each word in an highlighted bounding box, and then a Latin Glossary indicating the user to roll over the highlighted words to link to other instances of the word in the transcript; (bottom row of windows, left to right), an Old English manuscript, an Old English transcription, and an Old English Glossary]

– 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 – its a – its a really cool little text on the allegorical significance of bells. Because, you know, everything’s an allegory in the Middle Ages, right? 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 – the Latin is corrupted, there’s all these kinda 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 – as they are translating it into Old English.

So, what D.M. allows me to do is to create something that kinda 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 sort of enter in through one text and come out on the other.

So, for instance, here’s the Latin manuscript.

[indicates top far left window with mouse pointer]

There’s a Latin transcription for all of it.

[indicates the top middle window with his mouse pointer and clicks on one of the Latin highlighted words that brings up a text link box that shows the word in the Latin glossary and the Old English glossary]

Ideally, you’d have a much bigger screen, my laptop is scrunching this all down. And then you have a Latin glossary, right? And so, here’s like every single moment of Latin.

[scrolls up and down in the Latin Glossary window]

And so, say you just want to study Latin, right? You could come at this text and be like, I’m gonna learn these words. And in the glossary, you get all this – all this grammar, and everything else. You also have the ability to easily in D.M. make externally links, right? So, this can –

[clicks on a link within the Latin Glossary window that opens up a new window with the Logeion Latin and Greek database for the word that was chosen]

– take you right out to the Logeion database for – for Greek and Latin and you can go right to the moment and get a full kinda deep dive –

[scrolls through the Logeion webpage]

– into everything you could possibly want to know about this word.

[returns to the D.M. project with the six open windows]

Right?

And that’s the other thing; the point is, like D.M. needs – you need to begin to create these resources that are able to capitalize on all the other existing resources out there.

[Martin Foys]

We call that interoperability in – in – in new media theory, right? The ability to kinda make connections between these projects and not simply always be siloed in like a book, like just kind of its own thing and not connected to – to anything else.

You’ll notice here that at the bottom of this it says Old English translation.

[return to the live demo and under the Latin Glossary he indicates a word that underneath it has an Old English translation with that translation highlighted in a bounding box]

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
donne, to do, right?

[uses mouse pointer to indicate the Old English translation highlighted in a bounding box]

That moment here, if you roll over that –

[rolls over the highlighted Old English translation in the Latin Glossary that brings up a new text box with links to other instances of that word in the Old English transcription and Glossary]

– it will take you right to that moment in the Old English transcription or –

[moves his mouse over the bottom middle box with the Old English Transcription where the instance of the word chosen in the Latin glossary resides and clicks on it opening up the text link box for the Old English Transcription that itself has a link to the occurrence on the map image]

– as well, and if youre in the Old – if – 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 – 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 U.V. analysis. We’ll do one –

[closes that text window, and moves over a different word in the Old English Transcription window that brings up a text link box for that word along with a thumbnail image link for the instance of that word in the manuscript image]

– on the second page which is much friendlier and gives you nice pretty thumbnails, there you go, right, for that. So, that kinda gives you some ideas of how D.M. works.

[closes the D.M. project webpage and opens the webpage for Old English Poetry in Facsimile on the U.W.s Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture webpage]

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 all of –

[Martin Foys]

– 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 kinda do a standard kinda translation of something, you’re gonna do an edition of an – of an Old English text that you’re interested in. So, he picked a kinda 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, you know, 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 kinda spend 20 minutes kinda looking at this? The Old English poetic corpus is not that big. There’s like a – at most like a hundred, no, maybe 200 entries. I thought, You know what, I could use D.M. 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 facsimiles that have – 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.

[scrolls down to the instance of the Maxims II in the Index of Facsimiles on the D.M. webpage – indicating that it is not highlighted in a bounding box meaning that it does not yet have links to the Digital Mappa project]

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.

[highlights the name of the poem with his mouse in the list of facsimiles on the D.M. index of facsimiles]

This might give me an error. No, it didn’t, good! Okay, so I’m – Im gonna make a highlight.

[the name of the poem becomes highlighted with a bounding box around it and a new text link window pops up]

Now I can do all sorts of things to this, right, ’cause it’s – its live. The next thing I’m gonna do is I’m gonna add the manuscript image in.

[clicks on the Old English Poetry in Facsimile link on the D.M. project that brings up a window with a list of image and text links]

I should point out, here’s –

[opens in a new tab the webpage for the Cotton MS Tiberius B 1 manuscript on the British Library website that has a high-resolution image of the manuscript]

– where you can get the manuscript image, here’s Cotton Tiberius B1, the British Library has been digitizing all these.

[opens in a new tab the image of the manuscript from the British Library]

Here’s the actual opening of the –

[zooms in and out of the manuscript on the webpage]

Whoa!

– the Cotton Tiberius B1 in extremely high resolution, right?

[zooming in and out on the image]

And – and if you – there’s a tool you can use –

[opens a new tab with the tool that grabs the manuscript image and grabs the image]

– 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, were gonna – this is a bit like a cooking show –

[returns to the Digital Mappa site and the Old English Poetry in Facsimile image and text box]

– now ’cause I’m gonna just like suddenly kinda pull something else, nice and neat, that I’ve – that Ive already prepared. So, what I’m gonna do is –

[clicks on the Add Resources tab in the image and text box and selects upload image]

– I’m gonna upload the text of Maxims II to the project.

[upload image dialogue box opens; he selects Choose File and selects the manuscript image]

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 – its only two pages. Page – 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 – you cant put colons in file names, but you can in here, so that – that – that should do it. So, we’ll just upload that image right now.

[choses the image files, names the file in the Title field and uploads the image]

And it takes about five seconds, and then boom! There it is, right?

[the image file appears in the Old English Poetry in Facsimile text and image window]

So here it is, we’ll open that up.

[clicks on the file image and the manuscript image opens up in a new window]

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.

[changes layout to have the manuscript image on the right and the facsimile index on the left in the D.M. project]

And the first thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna link this image –

[clicks on a new link button in the manuscript image window and a new link box show up, clicks on the link icon in the link box and then clicks on the highlighted bounding boxed text of Maxims II in the Index of Facsimiles – a link image appears and then disappears to show that they are linked]

– to that – that – that version of Maxims. So, now it’s linked, so now when you go and you open this up and you roll over –

[uses mouse to roll over the Maxims II highlighted bounding box in the index and a new link window appears with a thumbnail of the image appearing in the link box]

– it’ll take you right to it, right? But here’s the amazing thing. So –

[in a tab opens a new website that has the transcription of Maxims II]

– 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.

[Martin Foys, holding up the aforementioned book]

Here’s volume five – 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 – 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 –

[image of the site that converted the poems to HTML on screen]

– and sort of identified all these different aspects and then made it freely available, and so now you have –

[return to the website that has the transcription of Maxims II]

– so now you just have it just freely available online, every single moment. So, the next thing we will do is we will just grab this text –

[uses mouse to highlight the transcribed transcript and copies it]

– which is the transcription of Maxims II and copy it and then we’ll go back to our project.

[returns to the D.M. website of this project with the manuscript in one window and the Index of Facsimiles in the other window]

And we’ll say, You know what? –

[clicks on the Maxim II highlighted bounding box in the Index for Facsimiles which opens up the link box for the transcript with the thumbnail of the image of the transcript]

Let’s now create a transcription of this.

We’ll create a new annotation.

[clicks on the annotation icon in the link box]

We’ll change the layout to threefold now –

[selects Layout and chooses three-fold layout with the Index on the far-left window, the image of the manuscript on the far right window, and the transcription in the middle window]

– so, I can see what I’m doing, and we’ll just paste that in there –

[pastes the transcription of Maxim II into the Transcription window]

– there it is. We’ll call this Maxims II, A.S.P.R. edited text.

[renames the Transcription window to the above text]

There it is. It’s all ready to go. And now we can begin to link things up, right?

So, it begins on page 160, folio 165 V, right?

So, on folio 165 or 15, I can’t remember now, let’s see.

115, right, so folio 115 V.

[Types the words Folio 115V at the beginning of the transcript in the Transcripts window]

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.

[Draws a right-angled link bracket to the left and bottom of the photo of the Maxims II manuscript]

Put that right there. We’ll make this a highlight.

[goes to the Transcripts window and highlights the 115V type of the transcript and then clicks on the link icon on the top of the Transcripts window to make the 115V text linkable]

Boom.

We’ll link the two up.

[Clicks on the link bracket on the photo of the manuscript which brings up a new link window]

You click on this link button.

[Clicks on the link button on the top of the window]

The next thing you click on –

[Returns to the Transcripts page and the linkable 115V linkable text and clicks on that linkable text]

– forges a link; watch you’ll see link thing flash on here.

[a small link icon flashes on and off the screen]

Boom! There it is.

Now you’ve got a link, so now when you roll over this –

[uses mouse to roll over the highlighted text in the Transcripts window that opens up a new link window that has a thumbnail icon of the part of the manuscript photo that that text is linked to]

– it will take you right to the opening of that moment, right?

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 –

[uses mouse on the photo image of the transcript to move around the image until he comes to the top of the next page of the manuscript image]

– 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, fugel, so we’ll take that –

[uses pen tool to create a linkable line under the first word of the second page of the image – fugel]

– we’ll make that there –

[moves over to the Transcript window and pages down until he finds the word fugel in the transcript of the poem]

– we’ll go down and find fugel. I believe it’s on around 39, line 39 or so. There it is, so we’ll say there is Folio 115.

[types the initials f.115.v. before the word fugel to indicate it is on the next page of the image]

Yeah, so it’s on this side, so it’s a left, v.

So, we’ll make that –

[highlights the initials f.115v on in the Transcripts window and then clicks on the link button on the top of the Transcripts window]

– we’ll do that. We’ll link that up.

[clicks on the underlined word link fugel in the image of the second page of the transcript which brings up a new link window]

And there –

[moves over to the Transcript window and clicks on the highlighted link words f.115.v; a small link icon flashes on the screen]

– we’ve done it.

Now here’s the last thing I’m gonna show you there. And so that when you roll this – roll over this –

[uses mouse to roll over the text f.115.v which brings up the link window with the thumbnail image of the location of the start of that text in the manuscript image]

– it’s – its right there as well. And when you roll over Maxims II –

[rolls over the highlighted link in the Index page for Maxims II which brings up the link window that has a thumbnail image of the photograph of the manuscript for Maxims II as well as the link to the transcript in the Transcript window]

– you get links right to the transcription of – of the – of the text and the – and the – 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 AS.P.R. transcription –

[uses mouse to highlight a bolded word in the Transcription window]

– and those are editorial emendations. The guy that did the whole kind of HTML thing also went through and checked every time that the editors of this book –

[Martin Foys, holding up the folio book]

– changed something, and then made that bold so you could go find it. So now, we have this kind of amazing ability to kind of tag those exact moments, with almost – with you know, with – with very little work. And so, we’re gonna – I’m gonna change the layout so I can more easily find this stuff.

[changes the layout in the D.M. program to the one window layout with the Index page on top]

But we’re gonna go find that moment of that bolded word.

[scrolls down on the webpage until he finds the Transcription window]

That word is switolost, which means the most clear, right? So, we’re gonna go and we’re gonna look –

[scrolls down to the window with the image of the manuscript in it and then scrolls through the manuscript]

[laughter]

[Martin Foys]

Right, it couldn’t be clearer, right?

switolost

So, this is where I’m gonna get – this is where – this is where – Oh, wait so first of all, I need to be on the first page, so we’ll go over here –

[manipulates the image of the manuscript so that he is on the first page]

– see if we can find it. I think it’s somewhere.

[zooms in and out on the photo of the manuscript]

So, let’s find out real quick what it’s around by scrolling up here.

[scrolls up to the Transcription window to see the words around the word for which he is looking]

– switolost, sod bid,

Right. Oh right, sod bid here it is.

[zooms into the phrase in the image of the manuscript]

So, there it is, and we see that it’s not switolost, if you know your Old English, it’s swikolost, which means – swikolost” means most deceitful. And this actual line is sod, which is truth, bid swikolost. So, these are maxims, these are like Ben Franklin kind of sayings. And so, this thing says, truth is the most deceitful.

[Martin Foys]

And so, an editor was like, That doesn’t make sense. And so, I’m gonna argue that the scribe confused –

[return to the Digital Mappa webpage with the photo of the manuscript of Maxims II in it]

– a C for a T there, because they actually are quite similar, here’s the T –

[uses mouse pointer to show an Old English T in the manuscript]

– kind of looks like a C. And there’s the C –

[uses mouse pointer to show an Old English T in the manuscript]

– so, thats gonna – I’m gonna amend that and say thats – that it – it should be truth is the clearest, right? That sounds much better. There’s a whole scholarly argument that, no, it’s actually supposed to be translate – it was right, and it’s supposed to be truth is the trickiest, you know. So – but, you know, we’re not gonna get into that here.

[laughter]

But what we are gonna do is we’re gonna tag that word –

[uses pen tool to underline switolost in the photo of the manuscript]

– boom, right like that. We’re gonna go back to –

[uses View menu to return to the three-window view with the Index window, Transcription window and the photo of the manuscript side-by-side]

– our view here. And we’re just gonna make this a highlight.

[highlights the bolded word switolost in the Transcription window and clicks the link button]

And we’re going to –

[clicks on the underlined word in the manuscript photo which brings up a link window – he clicks on the link button in that window – the link window disappears, and the link icon flashes on the screen]

– link it up and now every time somebody accesses this and they’re like, Oh, what’s – whats the inundation?; they don’t even have to open this –

[clicks on the bolded switolost in the Transcription window which brings up the link window with a thumbnail of the place on the manuscript photo that the word is]

– they just get the thumbnail, you know, and on a big screen they’d be able to see exactly right – right there, Oh, that’s swikolost, not switolost. And then they can go off and – and freak out and have arguments about it.

[laughter]

So – So, that’s my live – So – so – so, basically that’s –

[Martin Foys]

– thats the live demo. I’ll – Ill show you one last thing ’cause I forgot ’cause it’s so cool. Theres – the – the way in which you can use these tools are really neat –

[return to the Digital Mappa webpage with the photo windows open for the Cotton Map and the Psalter World Map]

– and here’s my favorite example from the Cotton Map. On the – to the north of Britain –

[manipulates Cotton Map to show the islands north of Britain in the window]

– you’ve got – youve got these islands here. You’ve got these islands here, right?

[clicks on the islands north of Britain on the map which brings up a link window]

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 Orcadesinsulae, which is the Latin for the Orkney Islands, right?

[clicks on the manuscript photo again to bring up the link window for the Orkney Islands]

And so, I used the segment line tool to trace the path of the words through the islands.

[closes the link window and uses mouse to point out the path of the pen tool in creating the link for the islands]

Right?

[clicks on the path and the link window for the Orkney islands appears again]

And so, you can do this with all sorts of things. You could trace like, you know, the – the path of a river through a map, or you could trace, let’s say you have a collection of X-rays, you could path –

[Martin Foys]

– you could trace some sort of pathway through something or music – musical scores.

So- so, let’s – lets now go back and I’ll sort of 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.

[slide with a meme of a determined child that says, Did a Live Demo and It Worked]

So, then we did the live demo. And then I did the live demo and it worked.

[laughter]

I thought it was pretty courageous of me to put that – put that meme in there.

[new slide titled, D.M.2 – in the works now, with several screenshots from the new version of D.M.]

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 – I wouldnt recommend using –

[Martin Foys]

– doing – using it to – to work with more than five or six objects at a time or texts at a time. And so, we have money from U.W.2020 to – a very generous fund to kinda build 2.0. And so, that’s exactly what’s going on now. Here’s a – Heres a screenshot of the prototype of 2.0.

[return to the D.M.2.0 – in the works slide]

It’s gonna look a lot nicer than this that I got from the developer in our – our weekly video call last week. And its – it’s showing a couple of things. First of all, it’s showing a kind of ability to color code, the – the – the different tags you might want to make so you could begin to create a kind of 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. And you know, you could – you could – you could begin to parse and eventually, we’re gonna get to the point where –

[Martin Foys]

– we want to be able to filter those so you could just kinda click them on and off, like you would layers and then the G.I.S. document.

Also, we’re gonna have this kinda sidebar here to give a much more robust ability to manage collections and subcollections. So, you’d be able to import like entire manuscripts of like hundreds of pages in here and – 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 –

[slide featuring a screenshot of a manuscript photo in D.M. 2.0]

– these – these – 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 triple I – F, triple – or I can’t remember what that I’s stand for. I-I-I, it’s like International Image Interoperability Framework or something. I think that might be it. Triple I – F.

[laughter]

And – and its – it’s just, it’s a standard, it’s a protocol and everyone’s beginning to build these tools, so if something is in –

[Martin Foys]

– triple I – F, 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 – all surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, so it’s very dear to my heart. And they just made their entire digitized repository open access, public accessible, and triple I – F compliant, which means you can grab – if you’re looking at this image –

[return to the screenshot of the manuscript photo in D.M. 2.0]

– you can grab this little logo and dump it into a triple I – F 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 triple I – F compliant, so not only will you be able to work with your local files –

[Martin Foys]

– like I just did today, but you will now be able to kind of on-the-fly be able to consume and – 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 N.E.H. grant that we’re gonna go for. And which we’re gonna – were gonna do a couple of new things that kinda 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 triple I – F. That means if you assemble a collection of images in – in Digital Mappa, or D.M. 3.0, you would be able to then publish that – that manifest and then anybody else could kinda grab that manifest and just take all your images and begin to work with them in a different way, if you wanted, right?

Secondly, every – remember those kinda 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 off it, you make an annotation, each of those is generating its own unique U.R.L. 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 – an, you know, an article about representation of islands, and in maps and you want to cite that, you would be able to just copy the U.R.L. and put it in your own online publication and it would take you right to that moment in the virtual mappa project and open – and open it up for you. So, you have that kinda granular citationality 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.

[laughter]

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 D.M. is rather arduous. You need a – you need a network admin who knows what he’s doing or she’s doing, and you need to – you need to, you know, execute these shell scripts and do all this kind of stuff that’s beyond me, and what we want to do, of course, is be, like, I want to use D.M., click. You know, Now I’m using D.M.

And so, with that, though, you then would have the ability to take seed projects – so, say you have that – that example of the Old English facsimile, Poetry in facsimile project that I was using, that’s gonna, it’s just basic, right? It’s just the text and the image and a few kinda pointers to locate yourself, and that’s it. Say you had that, and youre like, 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 as – to the project. Give them all their own accounts and then assign different things to – to do it.

I didn’t show this because I didn’t get permission from the students to show it, but in the I School this year, Heather Wacha, who’s our- whos as our postdoc fellow working on this, taught a class in the history of the book and she used D.M. to have students go to all these different digital repositories of medieval manuscripts and write reviews, which they all did in D.M. 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, like, reviews of, like, 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 D.M. 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.

[slide featuring the a screenshot of the D.M. website and the website address – sandbox.digitalmappa.org ]

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 kinda begin to publish information, present information in – in new ways.

[new slide featuring a screenshot of the webpage for the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture and the website of the Digital Mappa Project – www.wiscprintdigital.org/digital-mappa-dm-at-the-university-of-wisconsin-madison/ ]

At U.W., we have what we call a D.M. at U.W. It’s part of the mission of the U.W.2020 grant and so we’re on call, me and Heather Wacha and Max Gray and a – and a few other of our graduate assistants, our sort of our jobs would be project managers and to help you to kinda 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 U.R.L. for that very long U.R.L., and everything you know –

[Martin Foys]

– 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 – the little button that says U.W. and you’ll be able find it.

And that is all I have to say about all this. Thank you very much.

[applause]