Methods and Tools

This page outlines the principles and methods that guided the digital edition of three volumes from Françoise Baillet’s collection of Punch’s Pocket Book.

This edition has been created by the Digital Document Unit with collaboration of CERTIC and WordPro (Pondicherry), an external provider.

Digital Document Unit (PDN) is a multidisciplinary division and an engineering platform within the Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines (CNRS/University of Caen Normandy). CERTIC is one of Caen Normandy’s IT departments. This structure, which is 100% self-financed through its contractual activities and research collaborations, is entirely dedicated to the transfer of information technology from the University of Caen Normandy.

The PDN designs, develops, and implements digital tools and working methods for research programmes Humanities and Social Sciences through a data-centred approach. This approach means that research and monitoring efforts will focus primarily on data models rather than on exploitation tools. The expertise developed around these models facilitates the production of generic solutions for the handling, analysis, and consultation of documents. These generic tools are then adapted to address specific scientific needs.

One of the key challenges is to ensure the creation of a shared digital continuum across all participants in a project, in order to facilitate scientific and/or heritage-oriented dialogue around this data. PDN is also committed to promoting the principles of Open Science by producing FAIR data stored in repositories such as Nakala and Zenodo. Most of the data produced is licensed under Creative Commons (CC-BY).

Punch’s Pocket Book Archive pilot site was created in accordance with these principles and methods. PDN was in charge of finding technical partners for digitisation, transcription and encoding of the texts, annotation of images, and overseeing technical processes. The digitisation of the three volumes of Punch’s Pocket Book displayed here was carried out in-house by the MRSH and the University Library.

The Pôle also opted for Text Encoding Initiative as markup language to encode collection, and developed the data-entry environment required for text editing (input interface within the XMLMind XMLEditor software).

Lastly, PDN adapted the MaX display engine for the publication of data (texts and images), and designed navigation tools for the sources (search engine, indexes).

The CERTIC team designed the JAMA tool for the management and the annotation of pocket books iconography.

The large number of — images, frontispieces, illustrations, ornaments and initial letters — is one of the distinctive features of the corpus. It has motivated the development of specific tools for annotating directly on the images themselves, in full compliance with established standards (IIIF) and image viewing tools (Mirador). On completion of the project, the image annotations should be converted into TEI XML files, in accordance with TEI guidelines.