JCDL 2009: Session 9: short talks
The short talks attracted a standing room only crowd, although the twitter chatter seemed to all be in the other talk (or maybe @HCIR_GeneG was taking notes with twitter).
The first talk announced a coming firefox plugin which will allow folks to self archive their facebook data. (Ah, hope for all the “mail” messages which sit there, independent of my mail store.)
The second described an interesting use of a coming genealogical database, where the API helps in the unique tagging of individuals in the Historical Journal project. (Location tagging supported; search to come.)
The next two addressed a much deeper cut in history: collecting the fragments of texts known only through the quotations in ancient and medieval texts and imaging a particularly warped and rebound vellum codex.
What Happens When Facebook is Gone?
Frank McCown and Michael Nelson
Standing room only for “What Happens When Facebook is Gone?”
“was just told that twitter is the intersection of stalking, adhd, and narcissism by Frank McCown at #jcdl2009.” @plbogen
An informal poll shows that JCDL attenders think they will be able to get to their Facebook account in one year but they’re dubious about ten years. A “surprising” number of people wouldn’t mind if their Facbook account suddenly went away, here at JCD
Facebook Terms of service prevent any sort of harvesting. (Shout out to data portability maven @danielabarbosa. He has a graduate student developing a firefox plugin that will allow manual harvesting. http://www.harding.edu/fmccown.
Improving Historical Research by Linking Digital Library Information to a Global Genealogical Database
Douglas J. Kennard, William B. Lund and Bryan S. Morse
Journals, letters, and other writing. Most not in libraries and archives but in family collections. Expense of transcription and
BYU Historic Journals Project will allow individuals to upload and catalogue with links to the FamilySearch Genealogical Databases API. [Sounds like this has not quite been released] This database is then used for unique tags for persons.
They’re also going to support relationship links such as membership in the same societies, creating rosters of membership in groups (military, societies, churches, etc). [Oh, very cool!]
Collecting Fragmentary Authors in a Digital Library (Greek Fragmentary Historians)
Monica Berti, Matteo Romanello, Alison Babeu and Gregory Crane
A Perseus Project paper (at last! JCDL is not complete without a Perseus talk!)
Fragment: physical pieces where the whole context is missing *and* quotations embedded in complete texts. Apparently there are print collections of fragmentary texts, with commentary.
Now a digital collection of fragmentary text should have these charateristics: [not a complete list, as the talk is proceeding quite quickly and my typing is lousy] quotation as a machine actionable link — that is, link back to the source text to see the whole context of the quotation, align across different citation schemes, collate all critical editions of the source text, then link out to the secondary & tertiary sources.
Robust Registration of Manuscript Images
Ryan Baumann and W. Brent Seales
The gasp of sympathy when the problem was described — finger print on sensor when taking 3 D images of warped vellum — must have been somewhat consoling.
So, given an flat clean image and the dirty 3D image, they warped the clean text to match the page. (This reminds me a bit of georectification techniques.) The same technique was used to map UV images to the a visual spectrum. A larger issue is comparing the degradation over time by registering older images to current ones.
