Alberto Campagnolo
Università di Udine & Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities | VeDPH
Researchers use images (pictures and drawings), verbal descriptions (words), and formulaic expressions to document artifacts. In the last few decades, the recording and management of documentation data about material objects, including bookbinding structure, has switched from paper-based archives to databases, but sketches and diagrams are a form of documentation still carried out mostly by hand. Furthermore, the gathering structure, the principal physical feature of the book in codex format, is not usually visualized within digitization projects. If this information is recorded at all, it is done with the use of information-dense collation formulas, but there is not a standard schema for manuscript collation formulas and not all practices are able to record accurately the structure of books. We will present a methodology to harness verbal information encoded within XML databases and automatically generate standardized and scholarly-sound visual representations. In particular, we will introduce VisColl, a new project that, building on past experiences, strives to describe, visualize, and communicate the gathering structure of books. Successful applications of the new tool will be presented as examples. Future versions will add functionality to link physical details of a manuscript with additional information about the content, which will enable a complete mapping of a physical manuscript.
