The Perseus Digital Library is pleased to announce an initial release of the new Perseus Art & Archaeology Artifact (A&A) Browser (Figure 1) that is based on CollectionBuilder and uses AirTable to manage the extensive metadata found within the A&A collection.
Figure 1: The new Perseus Art & Archaeology Browser (with randomly selected images on the home page)
An Art and Archaeology Browser has been an integral part of Perseus
since the release of Perseus 1.0 in 1992, then described as “a
multimedia interactive library” and a legacy instantiation
has been available in Perseus 4.0 since 2004. While work has moved
ahead on the Perseus textual collections with the development of the Scaife Viewer starting in 2018, the initial release of Beyond Translation
in 2023 and the continuing development of Perseus 6, these efforts have
been concentrated on textual data, annotations and related reading
tools rather than images of the ancient world and its material objects.
This update was long overdue. As happens with all software, the
current version of the A&A Browser has become outdated, and it can
no longer be updated or maintained. The new version addresses several
issues:
The images have been converted to a common, standard format (TIF)
and stored on an institutional server, where they are available to all
through the IIIF Image API. Previously, images either could not be viewed at all due to rights restrictions or were only available as thumbnail images.
The metadata has been migrated from an ad hoc record format to CIDOC-CRM,
an ontology commonly used in cultural heritage institutions to describe
their holdings. CRM is highly expressive, allowing us to expand upon
the descriptions and relations already represented in the old XML data.
Even more important, it is an RDF
representation, which means the Perseus A&A metadata will become
part of the linked open data network of metadata about cultural heritage
materials already being built by cultural heritage institutions
world-wide. In addition to this conversion, the metadata can also now be
corrected, updated and enhanced.
The new web interface has been built using minimal computing
principles. This paradigm is rapidly being adopted by digital
humanities projects and digital libraries (see for example, https://lib-static.github.io/)
As in the P4 browsing environment, the collection features hundreds
of descriptive catalog entries composed by Perseus editors, who also
created descriptive keywords. Most entries (see Figure 2) include
corresponding images (see Figure 3 ) and/or illustrations (many of these
images were collected via custom photography for Perseus). Basic
information about the objects has been taken from a number of different
standard sources, each of which is cited in the object entries. The new
interface also makes use of the IIIF image API to access the images on a
IIIF image server (see Figure 4) for individual images. In the short
run, this provides users a greatly enhanced experience with the ability
to zoom in on details. More significantly, we can integrate images from
any collection that makes its data available with a IIIF server. That
means that the Perseus viewer could be expanded to include materials
from many different collections.
Figure 2: A sample catalog entry for a vase with a large
number of images. Clicking on the image thumbnail launches a new image
window as seen in Figure 3
Figure 3: A new image window opens up with image level
metadata and an option to “Click to view Full Screen” at the bottom of
the image. Clicking this calls the image from an IIIF server and opens it in a new window as illustrated in Figure 4.
Figure 4: The image in a new viewing window with zooming capability.
An extensive bibliography, available in earlier versions of Perseus,
will eventually be published online as part of this new release with
links (where available) to bibliographic sources that are either
open-access or in the public domain.
In addition to the significant work of the dedicated Perseus editors
over the years, all of the descriptions and images in these collections
were also produced through collaboration with scholars, researchers,
museums and cultural heritage institutions over 25 to 30 years ago. With
the release of this new interface we are hoping to again embrace
greater collaboration as we look to better integrate the metadata and
images into both the Perseus textual collection and beyond.
We call this an initial release because it is only an early version
of the system we plan to build. While all the metadata is freely
available in our GitHub sites in several formats, including CSV and RDF,
our use of CRM is limited. There are also extensive bibliographical
references in the metadata that must be resolved into modern digital
citation formats, including those that enable them to be linked into the
new Perseus Digital Library and potentially other digital collections.
And of course the graphical user interface needs extension and
refinement (one new feature for example is the ability to browse the
collection by subject word cloud in Figure 5). We are making it
available now for two reasons: 1) the computing platform on which the
current browser runs is failing and must be retired soon; and 2) we want
user feedback to guide us as we refine the new version.
Figure 5: A Word Cloud for Subjects.
We welcome your opinions on the new A&A browser. Please email the Perseus webmaster with your comments and suggestions.
The AWOL Index: The bibliographic data presented herein has been programmatically extracted from the content of AWOL - The Ancient World Online (ISSN 2156-2253) and formatted in accordance with a structured data model.
AWOL is a project of Charles E. Jones, Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities at the Pattee Library, Penn State University
AWOL began with a series of entries under the heading AWOL on the Ancient World Bloggers Group Blog. I moved it to its own space here beginning in 2009.
The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.
The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.
AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.
Posts
Stumble It!
No comments:
Post a Comment