Auden-Musulin-Papers/amp-app: Pre-Release (v0.1.0)

Pre-Release v0.1.0

We are happy to announce our first web-application release. Built on top of the amp-data repository v0.3.0, this release offers features to explore the Auden Musulin Papers digital edition, access biographical information on W. H. Auden and Stella Musulin, and learn about this FWF-funded project.

1 Project

Auden Musulin Papers: A Digital Edition of W. H. Auden's Letters to Stella Musulin is a three-year project funded by the FWF Austrian Science Fund (Forschungs- und Wissenschaftsfonds). The project is based at the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Austrian Academy of Sciences, and is carried out in collaboration with Landessammlungen Niederösterreich (State Collections of Lower Austria); Zentrum für Museale Sammlungswissenschaften (Center for Museum Collections Management) at Donau-Universität Krems (University for Continuing Education Krems); The Estate of W. H. Auden; and the Computer Vision Lab of TU Wien. Further details can be found in the Project Description section.

2 Data

This digital edition project uses XML technology for data transcription, employing TEI ontology for markup. The project-specific transcription guidelines are outlined in the Editorial Declaration.

Pre-Release v.0.1.0 includes the facsimiles and transcripts of all of W. H. Auden's letters and literary papers from Stella Musulin's collection, as well as of Musulin's memoirs "The Years in Austria" and "In Retrospect".

The following structural and semantic features are marked up in TEI/XML: divisions <div>; paragraphs <p>; page breaks <pb>; line beginnings <lb>; line groups <lg> and lines <l> for poetry; additional typographic spaces <space>; writing modes (handwritten, typed, printed) <... hand="...">; deletions <del>; underlines <hi rend="underline">; characters that cannot be transcribed with certainty <unclear> or are undecipherable <gap>.

The TEI/XML files also contain these metadata: edition title <title level="s">; document titles <title level="a">; authors <author>; editors <editor>; funding body <funder>; publisher domain <publisher>; copyright licence <licence>; manuscript history <origDate> and identification data <msIdentifier>; languages used <language>; correspondence details <correspDesc>; information on file revision <revisionDesc>.

Supplementary biographical data pertaining to W. H. Auden and Stella Musulin have been derived from multiple primary and secondary sources and encoded in TEI/XML, with markup of time <date> and place <place>. Place names have been cross-referenced with GeoNames identifiers.

3 Web Application Features 3.1 Search and Explore

There are multiple ways to explore the Auden Musulin Papers. Documents can be selected from a chronologically ordered card preview, with titles and dates displayed. Furthermore, there is a table view with built-in search and sorting features. Finally, a text-search feature uses the public Static Search plugin. Currently, this search feature enables the user to find information through specifying date ranges or by means of full-text search.

The full-text search supports:

• Stemming of terms (e.g., 'wait' will also retrieve 'waiting', 'waits', 'waited', etc.).
• Boolean search operators: adding '+' (plus) before words yields only search results that contain those words; adding '-' (minus) yields results that do not contain that word. Otherwise, searches are treated as 'may contain'.
• Phrasal search: any quoted phrase will be searched 'as-is', and when quoted phrases are included in a search, any hit document must contain at least one of them.
• Wildcard searches:
  • asterisks (*)
  • question marks (?)
  • and square brackets ([ab]) You can search for:
    • lo[uv]e? to find 'loved', 'loued', 'loves', 'louer', etc.
    • lo*e? to find 'loued', 'loved' etc.
• Search filtering: selecting specific date ranges.

3.2 Detail View

The detailed view of each transcript provides access to the transcribed text, together with the digital photographic reproduction of the document. A comprehensive description of the representation of the edited documents is included in the Editorial Declaration.

For viewing the facsimile, the JavaScript OpenSeadragon plugin has been implemented. This viewer uses a IIIF manifest to access images. The IIIF manifest is stored at the online data archive ARCHE. Common features of the viewer include zooming, centering, and full-screen view.

View option controls (from left to right):

• Full screen: customized full-screen option
• Image on/off: enables/disables the OSD viewer
• Font size: changes font size of the transcription text
• Font: changes the font family of the transcription text (default: Times New Roman for handwritten text; Courier New for typed text; Arial for print)
• Original text features: switches on/off all original text features (see below)
• Deleted (pink): enables/disables display of deletions
• Unclear (grey): highlights unclear sections of the document
• Underlined (purple): switches on/off display of underlines (default: underlined sections of text are represented in italics)
• Original white space (green): enables/disables display of additional typographic white space such as indentations of lines and multiple white spaces

A resizing bar allows users to customize the widths of the text and image areas.

3.3 Biographical Timelines

Two timelines visualize biographical data pertaining to the life and work of W. H. Auden (in the period 1958-1973) and Stella Musulin (1915-1996), respectively. These timelines biographically contextualize, and link to, the edited documents. All mentioned places were identified using consistent identifiers taken from the geographical database GeoNames.

3.4 Metadata

Each document has a persistent identifier that takes users to the archived version of the document in the ARCHE long-term repository. All images are provided via IIIF Endpoints. The TEI/XML versions of the transcribed documents are available for download as well. Furthermore, metadata, describing the sources, are available in RDF Turtle format (ttl). The RDF triples have been created using the ACDH-Ontology.