The Venetus A in a IIIF manifest

The Homer Multitext project (HMT) has made its digital photography of manuscripts of the Iliad with scholia available online since 2007. Since 2017, we have published periodic releases of all the project’s work in a single, massive plain-text file. These published datasets have always included catalogs of the project’s digital images, and datasets relating the images to the manuscript pages they document. We’re now beginning to add a third form of publication: extracts from the published datasets in the format of the IIIF Presentation Manifest.

What’s included

The HMT’s data model for a codex manuscript is simple. It’s a sequence of pages, each documented with a sequence number, identification as recto or verso, a full human-readable label, and a pair of CITE URNs associating identifiers for the physical page and the documentary image used to catalog the page.

With this simple model, we can easily relate other citable content (most notably edited passages of the Iliad and scholia) to navigable views of a manuscript.

The IIIF’s Presentation model has overlapping goals. Its elaborate JSON structure lets you define a series of canvases, on which you can place “annotation pages” that can include annotations such as images to place on the canvas. Many IIIF viewers support navigating a series of images documented in a IIIF manifest. The new manifests for HMT manuscripts label images with the data of our simple codex model.

How we do it

HmtArchive.jl is a Julia package that streamlines working with the HMT project’s published data sets. The hmt_codices function instantiates all the documented manuscripts in a release (currently seven).

using HmtArchive.Analysis
currentrelease =  hmt_cex()
mss = hmt_codices(currentrelease)

7-element Vector{CitablePhysicalText.Codex}:
 Burney 86 manuscript
 Escorial Y 1.1 manuscript
 Escorial, codex Ω 1.12
 Laurentian Library codex 32.3
 Venice, Biblioteca Marciana 841
 Venetus A manuscript
 Venetus B manuscript

As the example shows, the output is a list of Codex objects. Last week, I released a version of the CitablePhysicalText.jl package that includes a new function, iiifmanifest, for directly generating a presentation manifest from a Codex object.

Tip

The documentation for the CitablePhysicalText package includes a tutorial on how to build a IIIF manifest from a Codex object.

This is not only convenient: iiifmanifest also validates both the syntax and the referential integrity of its reply. It parses the JSON syntax that IIIF viewers expect, and queries the configured image service for metadata about each image in the manifest, guaranteeing that viewer applications can correctly find the documented image.

I’ve added a iiif directory to the HMT project’s github archive where we will publish IIIF manifests for each of our documented manuscripts. Today we’re publishing a manifest for the uniquely important Venetus A manuscript (Marciana 454 = 822). Use this URL with any IIIF viewer that accepts a URL for a IIIF manifest, and you’ll be browsing the Venetus A.

Next steps

I plan to add IIIF manifests for the project’s other six documented manuscripts to the github repository as they are successfully generated and tested.

Tip

See the README in the github repository’s iiif directory for the current status of this work in progress.