Project Statement
Annotations made by a writer in the margins of printed texts or images are crucial sources for analysis in literary, philosophical, and historical study. There are few software projects that gather and display an author’s manuscript marginalia. Marginalia allows more genuine dialog between the reader and author, and we hope to p reserve and consolidate these print editions of Herman Melville’s Marginalia for the future of scholarly studying through software.
Melville's Marginalia Online (MMO) catalogs the personal library of American novelist Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick, and digitizes in a machine-readable format the markings and notes (aka "marginalia") that he inscribed by hand into the books he read. This Design Team project aims to replace MMO's aging, Adobe Flash/Flex image markup editor with a new editor using current software and updated design elements.
Our project is being built to prototype a digital interface to facilitate the transcription and markup of texts of mixed-media. Such files include handwritten annotations on images of printed text of Herman Melville’s library.
Project Abstract
The tool we have built is used for marking markup on digital scans of pages from any book or author. We built the tool using React and made it compatible on all web browsers for ease of use on many machines. The tool has all the basic features of the previously used tool by the research team but has been built to have additional features easily added unlike the previous tool.
Project Description
What we actually built:
This application is a React based replacement for a previous program used for designating where markup is on a scanned page. The application was developed in React and uses a simple HTML and CSS website with Javascript to display and function. This means that the user will not have to run any executable as long as they have a basic web browser that supports Javascript. The web browsers that we have tested the application thoroughly on are Firefox and Chrome, but it also has worked on Edge whenever we have used it on that browser.
How it works:
It works by communicating with the server that hosts the images of the books, Herman Melville's works in our case, and allows the user to go through all volume and pages of the book on the server. On each page, the user can draw bounding boxes around the markup that allows them to write comments on that boxed area. After the boxes have been drawn and described, they can be uploaded to the server in an XML file to be displayed on the website with their respective comments.
List of Supported Features:
- Click and release to draw boxes.
- Shift + Click to select and drag boxes.
- Buttons on the top left for page and volume navigation.
- Write notes and tag boxes with respective types using pop-up menu for boxes.
- Upload XML to file or server from the application.
