691Digitizing Ancient Inscriptions with OpenLayers

2008-02-21T23:37:00Z

Update: For some background on this particular inscription see Tom's post on the demarcation between Thraces and Moesi.

The subject of digitally annotating texts and art works came up at last fall's NEH/CNR conference, and I thought: we could do that with OpenLayers. Recently, I read this post at the Stoa Consortium and thought: we could really do this with OpenLayers. And that's what we did today at the Pleiades skunk works: put a photo of an inscribed stone in an OpenLayers image layer, drew polylines over it in a vector layer, and then wrote the layer out to SVG: http://zcologia.com/images/MXITRIB.svg.

http://zcologia.com/images/MXITRIB.jpg

Feel free to try it out: http://atlantides.org/inscriptol/. Once we add the capability to edit or delete polylines, add text annotations/metadata, and save the results this could be the beginning of a useful tool. Check out that nifty SVG transform group: maybe I haven't lost all my linear algebra yet.

OpenLayers simply rocks.

Comments

1Re: Digitizing Ancient Inscriptions with OpenLayers

Paul Ramsey, 2008-02-22T00:20:01Z
What's the use case for digitized inscriptions? I don't comprehend.

2Re: Digitizing Ancient Inscriptions with OpenLayers

Yves Moisan, 2008-02-22T14:03:10Z
Same question here, but I do find it neat to use OpenLayers in images other than geospatial in nature. Annotations seem to me like the low hanging fruit here. An example : being able to share e.g. an air photo amongst a group of people that could trace out where they think the terminal moraine is and discuss through annotations the relative merits of delineation A vs B would be one heck of an interesting tool for photointerpreters. I have to look seriously at OpenLayers.

3Re: Digitizing Ancient Inscriptions with OpenLayers

Sean, 2008-02-22T15:31:12Z
Collaborative interpretation, for sure. And last night I received an email from a researcher who is using traces like these to train character or inscription extraction software. The humanities are more quantitative than you'd guess.

4Re: Digitizing Ancient Inscriptions with OpenLayers

Tom Elliott, 2008-02-22T15:40:56Z
I've started a thread aimed at answering Paul's question at Current Epigraphy. There's already one helpful response ...

5Re: Digitizing Ancient Inscriptions with OpenLayers

KoS, 2008-02-22T23:54:11Z
Great work. Neat use. I was thinking. From the stand point of capturing the text. Couldn't a laser scanner, running a edge detection on an image or something else similar, do almost the same thing? If you want vectors too, run a raster to vector conversion afterwards. KoS

6Re: Digitizing Ancient Inscriptions with OpenLayers

Tom Elliott, 2008-02-26T22:31:58Z
KoS: Certainly, and there are some folks working with automated techniques (see: M. Terras, Image to Interpretation: An Intelligent System to Aid Historians in Reading the Vindolanda Texts, Oxford, 2006, ISBN: 9780199204557 - publisher's blurb). Tools for manual work can still be valuable ... for example, for expert cleanup of automated vector creation (i.e., supervision and selection), or just for singling out arbitrary portions of an image for subsequent annotation.

7Re: Digitizing Ancient Inscriptions with OpenLayers

Stefano Costa, 2008-02-27T09:12:27Z
Really nice, for an archaeologist like me. This makes me think about 2 things: 1) it would be great to have an OGRGeometry method (and a Shapely one, too) like ExportToSVG(). This would allow easy vector image generation from geometries. 2) when using typical GIS tools like OL, OGR, for something that is geometric but not geographic, it's not always clear how to state that your XY(Z) coordinates are not in a specific CRS, nor lat/lon. See for example http://iosa.sharesource.org/ where we use OGR for the analysis of an ancient wall.

8Re: Digitizing Ancient Inscriptions with OpenLayers

Sean, 2008-02-27T15:33:12Z
Stefano, I know almost nothing about archaeological photogrammetry, so I'm very interested in learning from your projects.

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