Interactive Album of Mediaeval Palaeography

Available

 * https://paleographie.huma-num.fr/

Author/Editor

 * Marjorie Burghart

Description
The purpose of this interactive album, consisting in a collection of transcription exercises, is not to be a substitute for a proper learning of this science, but simply to allow students or amateurs (genealogists, History enthusiasts, etc.) to train themselves in the practical aspect of palaeography, that is reading manuscript texts.

Areas have been placed on the images and associated with their transcription in Image Markup Tool (IMT), a free software. Then, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML files created in IMT have been trnasformed into XHTML with an XSLT program. A CSS stylesheet and a javascript file control how the exercises work. This “palaeography exercise creation kit” is freely available on the IMT website, under “Paleography” (free software). The exercises of the album on this website have been created with this version of IMT, that generates XML TEI source files. But rather than publishing a static HTML export of those exercises, the XML TEI source files have been uploaded in a native XML database, eXist-db.

The website interface is written in PHP, that interacts with the eXist-db database via XML-RPC. The search function is provided by XQuery.

The XML TEI retrieved from the database is transformed into XHTML on the fly, through XSLT.

Reviewed in the Journal of the Digital Medievalist