Intro
Adventures with TEI:
adapting the EVT Viewer for use with Fedora
James Alexander
Digital Library Developer
Fedora Showcase
September 2023
Fun fact
I live in an old house near the middle of England’s newest city, Milton Keynes.
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Open University
About The Open University
Distance-based learning institution
Largest university in UK
Established in 1969
208 000 students
6 400 tutors
> 17% students identify as having a disability
Over 1 000 free courses on Open Learn site
Produce (almost) all taught course materials
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Digital Archive
Open University Digital Archive
Collections
Diverse collections centred around teaching materials and focused on its large Audio Video Archive.
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Sampson Low collection - Slide 4
Sampson Low collection
A collection of 19th Century letters
200+ letters collected by British publisher, Sampson Low. Includes letters from eminent 19th Century figures, includes politicians, social campaigners and writers.
The collected letters were pasted into two notebooks with annotations about the writer and/or subject. Focused on publishing, the letters include a wide range of subject matter.
Letter writers include – Dickens, Gladstone, Wellington, Robert E. Lee, Gustav Doré.
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Collection challenge
The challenge: develop the collection for public and scholarly access
The ‘usual’ things (we’d anticipated) -
Digitise the letters and prepare derivatives
Transcribe the text
Give some historical and biographic context for the letters (including attribution where possible) as part of creating online exhibition
There were x2 critical decisions that shaped development in retrospect…
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Key decision - description
Key decision 1
How to best describe the content? [Spoiler we used TEI]
The letters are quite messy!
Greatly varying standard of legibility of handwriting , but also the following issues:
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View of a letter
Typical Letter
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A difficult to read letter
One of my favourites!
The writer has presumably decided to save paper or possibly postage(?) by writing first horizontally and then vertically across the same page
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TEI - introduction
Solution 1 - use TEI markup
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
Xml markup for describing texts
© Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
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TEI – example missing text
Example –
how to describe missing text
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TEI markup example
TEI markup for missing text
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Problem 2
Problem 2
How to display content to make it as visually interesting and appealing as possible?
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Parallel views of image and text
Key decision 2 – Parallel image + text view
Any solution must incorporate parallel aligned views of the photographic page and a version of the transcribed text displayed opposite each other in a “book like” view -
Image
Text
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Leveraging available open source
How to leverage what is already available?
We have previously developed Fedora content for viewing with the Internet Archive’s BookReader, but needed a view with parallel display of image and text. Originally, we’d assumed that this would have to be further modified.
There are a several TEI Viewers, but most are designed to facilitate views of TEI as xml - not what was wanted.
Once we discovered it, there was only one candidate, EVT Viewer.
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EVT Viewer view
EVT Viewer
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Slide Title 8
EVT Viewer
Edition Visualization Technology
See http://evt.labcd.unipi.it/
Version 1.3 demo - http://evt.labcd.unipi.it/demo/evt_v1-3/dotr/
Continuously developed at the University of Padua since 2017 to view digital editions of manuscripts based on text encoded as TEI. The EVT Viewer was originally based upon the Internet Archive BookReader but has a much modified display and masses of advanced functionality based around its ability to display TEI markup as interface elements.
Functionality in addition to the parallel display of photographic image and text. -
The viewer incorporates the ability to switch from a diplomatic (“what you can see”) view to a critical/editorial view (includes interpretative material).
It would take a day to demo this adequately: there are more than thirty actionable controls on the main viewer screen alone.
Parallel text display and much, much more!
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EVT functionality
EVT functionality
Diplomatic View
The text as it appears
Creates togglable multiple views of the same content - Diplomatic and Critical views of text
Critical View
Text that includes editorial additions
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Customising the EVT Viewer
EVT Viewer customisation
Vanilla modifications
Rebadging for Open University’s style guidelines
Toggling on/off interface elements
Alterations to basic templates (to simplify)
Accessibility & javascript changes
Numerous changes for keyboard (and other) accessibility requirements
Amended some interface actions and elements
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See:
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EVT main feature - 2
Further EVT Viewer customisation and prep work
Creating multiple viewers
From one to many
EVT is designed to display a single manuscript but the requirement was to show each letter in a standalone viewer: so viewer creation was modified to facilitate creation of 200+ instances with distinct urls.
Also, we wanted to hold the master copy of the TEI xml as a Fedora datastream and not as a standalone xml document.
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Collection preparation
Collection preparation work
Standardising size of image displayed
We created access versions of the digitized master images with, as far as possible, standard display sizes, based on an image height of 1200 pixels, using ImageMagick® to generate these and associated thumbnails.
Transcription of letter texts
Transcriptions of the letter text matching exactly the end-of-line returns in the original were prepared. This greatly facilitated in creating the TEI markup automatically (which is marked up line-by-line).
Creating 200+ TEI documents
This is quite an undertaking – so we tried as possible to streamline creation of TEI xml documents…
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EVT workflow
Normal EVT workflow to create viewer
TEI
xml
xslt
Static HTML pages
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Usually the xslt transformation is performed in an xml editor, such as Oxygen
and this generates a series of static page templates and page fragments for display.
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EVT workflow
EVT workflow modified to simplify creation of TEI xml
TEI fedora
datastream
xslt
Static HTML pages
+
HTML Input form
xslt
+
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Input form
Input form for Letter
Simplifying creation of TEI documents for archive staff without an XML editing background
An input form with x24 fields including the transcribed letter text was created within the existing custom Fedora administration interface.
On submission, this creates a LETTER datastream with the form data. Additionally, this datastream is used to generate a TEI datastream that is a complete well-formed TEI xml document.
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Modify TEI
The generated TEI datastream
View of the markup of the TEI xml document as a datastream
A TEI document including the TEI header element and the marked-up pages of text is generated as a datastream.
The resulting document can still be edited as text using an xml editor, such as Oxygen, before being copied back into the form and re-submitted.
When the TEI datastream is submitted as a form, elements of any pre-existing version of the html for the EVT viewer are first removed and then an xslt transformation is triggered using Saxon Transform to create all the necessary html elements for the EVT viewer from the TEI.
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View of same letter in EVT viewer
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Take aways
Take away
We were able to develop a robust and user-friendly interface for Fedora content with relatively little effort, leveraging the work of the EVT Viewer developers.
Some of these features were things we regarded as essential -
Some features were highly desirable -
Some features we never used -
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Next steps
Next steps
Currently no plans to release modified EVT Viewer as open source but if there was some interest, we would reconsider this.
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Questions and Contact
Questions?
Thank you
james.alexander@open.ac.uk
Slide Title 31