Building a hypertextual digital library in the humanities: a case study on London

  • Authors:

  • Gregory Crane;David A. Smith;Clifford E. Wulfman

  • Affiliations:

  • Eaton Hall, Tufts University, Medford, MA;Eaton Hall, Tufts University, Medford, MA;Eaton Hall, Tufts University, Medford, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 1st ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

This paper describes the creation of a new humanities digital library collection: 11,000,000 words and 10,000 images representing books, images and maps on pre-twentieth century London and its environs. The London collection contained far more dense and precise information than the materials from the Greco-Roman world on which we had previously concentrated. The London collection thus allowed us to explore new problems of data structure, manipulation, and visualization. This paper contrasts our model for how humanities digital libraries are best used with the assumptions that underlie many academic digital libraries on the one hand and more literary hypertexts on the other. Since encoding guidelines such as those from the TEI provide collection designers with far more options than any one project can realize, this paper describes what structures we used to organize the collection and why. We particularly emphasize the importance of mining historical authority lists (encyclopedias, gazetteers, etc.) and then generating automatic span-to-span links within the collection.