SMART-GS Project: a toolsearching, marking up and linking historical documents

Susumu Hayashi, Kazuaki Kobayashi*), Kazuhiro Kobayashi, Yuuta Hashimoto, Tsukushi Shimizu, Yuuki Tamura, Humanistic Informatics, Kyoto University

Kengo Teraswa, Hajime ImuraMeme Media Laboratory, Hokkaido University*) present address: Goldman Sachs Japan Holdings, Ltd. Technology Division

Book pages annotated by underlines & marginal notes, etc.

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Bookmark by PostIt Flag

Underline

Marginal note

Linked annotations: relationship of annotations

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A region marked up by the brace

Brace

Marginal note

A line linking the region and the note

Annotations for historical documents

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My text analysis of the diary of 19-20th century German Mathematician David Hilbert, who is said the father of 20th century mathematics.

What are we doing?

Annotating images of book pages and historical documents by adding markups, bookmarks and texts (e.g.

marginal notes) relating them each other by links and, further relating them to resources outside:

books, papers & Web resources, e.g. references to papers , books and documents in archives.

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For the cases of Web and PDF documents…

Cyber documents, e.g. PDF files and HTML files, can be digitally annotated in similar ways.

Furthermore, words in such digital documents are searchable.

Imagine that historical documents can be digitally annotated and are searchable. Examples of such documents: handwriting documents, e.g. Hilbert’s diary. Image-base digital archives of books, journals and other

documents, now widely available on Web thanks to some libraries…

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An example of image-base digital archives

国立国会図書館近代デジタルライブラリー　 (National Diet Library, Digital library from the Meiji Era)

143,000 books from Meiji and Taisyo eras are open to the public.

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From NDL, Digital library from the Meiji Era; Y. Fukuzawa, Gakushya Anshin-ron

The goal of SMART-GS project

Providing platforms for marking up, linking and searching historical documents on PC and on the network.

Looks as a dream? No, it’s not a dream! We have already built a JAVA application

SMART-GS with the full functions required except the network features.

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Demo of SMART-GS applied to David Hilbert’s diary

The document: The first book of D. Hilbert’s diary: German handwritings from 1885-1892.

Searching a word in the diary The word searched is “Kronecker” another German

mathematician’s family name.

Marking up and linking images and texts One-to-Many Link SMART-GS used in real researches

my research on the diary Kazuhiro Kobayashi’s graduation research

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Working with SMART-GS onthree wide monitors

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A snapshot of my desktop. SMART-GS, an online digital archive, wikipedia, and a digital version of early 20th century dictionary

Towards tools on the Net

Historians with similar interests are often scattered through the globe. They wish to share knowledge for every-day researches, but it is not so easy.

SMART-GS technology will provide an excellent help for world-wide collaborations of a team of historians.

It may also provide a dramatic improvement on image-base online digital archives of handwritten and/or printed historical documents.

The key of such network version is the way the annotation was attached to images of historical documents: Gs-file!

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Gs-file: an XML file storing annotations and others

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Annotations are converted into the XML-format and stored in gs-file

= +

Document image

Inside of a gs-file

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Different gs-files provide different views on the same historical text

A model of network version-archive model-

Archive

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Gs-file

historian

reader

Gs-file

historian

Images

Annotation by gs-file

Annotation by gs-file

Historian publish their own gs-files to annotate document images in a public archive.

They can annotate also gs-files of other historians. A reader can browse views of

historians, if a historian makes his view open to the public.

Future network version can markup digital archives

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Another model of a network version-online collaboration model- Historian publish their own document images and gs-

files (views). They comment to views of other researchers.

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Images+gs-file

Images+gs-file

historian

historian

reader

Images+gs-file historian

Conclusion

SMART-GS system has been already applied to a study of a very important diary in the history of mathematics and proved its usefulness. There is also a plan to use SMART-GS in a project to

transcribe a gigantic diary of Yuuzaburo Kuratomi (1853-1948), a chairman of the privy council.

The network versions in the future will be useful for research collaborations and using digital archives.

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Conclusion (continued)

For technical and financial reasons, historians must often use secondary sources rather than primary sources. However, the secondary sources are products of “interpretations” of their authors!

SMART-GS technology together with online digital archives will provide historians with an easy and reasonable way to use primary sources for their studies.

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