Registered users of the Wired Humanities Projects Distance Research Environment can gain access by clicking here.
The Distance Research Environment (DRE) is an online collaboration environment that employs a number of tools and protocols allowing collaborating scholars to work on an unlimited number of “object” based research endeavors. The core element in the environment is an adaptable online database in which a single object, for example an image or line of text, is presented for comments and analysis by the collaborating group under the direction of the project director. The information—translation, transcription, description, commentary—is then evaluated by the director, acting as editor, and, with the concurrence of the scholars involved, published to an online project-specific site.
First developed for our Mapas Project, the DRE allows scholars and other experts to collaborate in the annotation, translation, description, and discussion of object-based digital material. We are now using an adaptation of the DRE for our Nahuatl Dictionary and anticipate further adaptations for other manuscript and language documentation projects.
Our most complete development of a DRE to date is that which was developed to produce the latest edition of the Mapas Project (a searchable database of facsimiles of Colonial Mexican Pictorial Manuscripts). Each pictorial manuscript added to the Mapas Project is first scanned or digitally photographed and the resulting digital representation of the whole (whether it is a single sided pictorial or multi-sided, multi-page codex) is added as an “object” to the Mapas Project DRE database and the information that pertains to the whole (e.g., title, alternative, titles, year created, culture that is depicted, time period that is depicted, and other metadata about the manuscript is added by the collaborating scholars working on that particular manuscript.
The manuscript is then sliced and dices into as many bits of text and pictoral elements as the scholars deem to be meaningful. There may be hundreds of elements so identified and a separate database record is created for each. As indicated above, we have modified Lightbox 2.0, first developed at Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH) by Amit Kumar and added it to our DRE database so that any element can be enlarged or otherwise enhanced by the user to aid in the translation or description of that item. Please visit the Lightbox link to see how we have used it.
After the analysis of the manuscript is complete, we publish the database in a different form – a web based collection of many early Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts that is searchable by language, culture, date, keywords, strings and blocks of text, and a number of other analytic elements. We have adapted and added other open source tools to the published site. Example of an annotated element of the Mapa de Tolcayuca that uses the IMT (Image Markup Tool) developed by Martin Holmes at the University of Victoria is shown below and on our IMT page.
We are using another version of the DRE for the merging and editing of vocabulary files that comprise the current Nahuatl Dictionary project, for creating a digital collection of atomized Age of Exploration maps, and we are using it for the annotation of digitized art for the Gender in History project.
For collaborators seeking to connect with the DRE for any of these projects, we now have some new URLs. Please contact Stephanie Wood (swood AT uoregon DOT edu).