Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities

Scriptorium

Developed by
Prof. Abigail Firey, Noah Adler, Michael Paddock
Professor of History
University of Kentucky

Project Home: https://scriptorium.as.uky.edu/

Project Description

Scriptorium is a digital environment for collaborative research on manuscripts, of any era or language. Scriptorium offers a powerful and flexible viewer for studying manuscript images: zoom, pan, compare multiple images on a single screen, annotate the images to draw attention to specific features in script, layout, illumination, etc. Scriptorium also allows collaborators to work together in real time on documents relating to their project, and to display to each other their discoveries in real time. Scholarly resources related to the project can be uploaded, stored, shared, and opened for viewing alongside manuscript images. Images can be displayed in the Scriptorium interface from any repository that publishes online its images using iiiF protocols.

Scriptorium addresses several problems in online collaborative research:

"Where Is Our Stuff?" (Different collaborators have different habits for naming and storing files; materials accumulate without protocols for organization and naming; folder trees are hard to explore)
"I don't work like you do." (Collaborators need flexible and personal spaces for conducting research and preparing documents, and arranging their spaces according to personal preference)
"I would really like to see what you have discovered!" (Collaborators need real-time, easy exchanges – both verbal and visual – of their work. They need to be able to share ideas, problems, evidence, and they need to do so both synchronically and asynchronously)

==> Overview: Scriptorium in Three Minutes (and a bit)

==> Tutorial Videos

Scriptorium is licensed under an AGPLv3 license. Scriptorium's initial development had generous support from an IMLS grant and Arcadia Foundation funds awarded to the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library as part of the development of vHMML. HMML continues to be a partner in making available in Scriptorium a large number of its digitised manuscripts. Scriptorium attained its 1.0 public release through the generous support of the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences and Research in Computing for Humanities. The public release was developed by Abigail Firey, Noah Adler, and Michael Paddock. The prototype of Scriptorium was developed by Abigail Firey, Andy McDonald (UK A&S) with David Pearce and Greg Neiheisel (Differential).