SLIS faculty John Walsh is a Co-Principal Investigator for a recently funded National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant. TILE: Text-Image Linking Environment is the project title. Walsh is Co-PI along with Dorothy Carr Porter of the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin, Ireland and Doug Reside of the Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities at the University of Maryland. SLIS doctoral student Timothy Bowman will be working with Walsh on the grant research.
Walsh participated in the Digital Humanities 2009 conference held June 22-25, 2009 at the University of Maryland. He presented a poster on the TILE Project with Porter and Reside. The introduction is included here (see page 388-390 of the Conference Abstracts).
• "Introduction -To create the next generation of the technical infrastructure supporting image-based editions and electronic archives of humanities content, we are developing a new web-based image markup tool, the Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE), through a collaboration of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, Indiana University Bloomington, the Royal Irish Academy, the University of Oregon, and Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. Despite the proliferation of image-based editions and archives, the linking of images and textual information remains a slow and frustrating process for editors and curators. TILE, built on the existing code of the AXE image tagger, will dramatically increase the ease and efficiency of this work. TILE will be interoperable with other popular tools (including both the Image Markup Tool and the Edition Production and Presentation Technology suite) and capable of producing TEI-compliant XML for linking image to text. We will also put the image linking features of the newest version of the Text Encoding Standard (TEI P5) through its first rigorous, “real world” test, and, at the close of the project, expect to provide the TEI with a list of suggestions for improving the standard to make it more robust and effective. TILE will be developed and thoroughly tested with the assistance of our project partners, who represent some of today’s most exciting image-based editions projects, in order to create a tool generated by the community, for the community, with the expectation that, unlike so many other tools, it will be used by the community."
Following the conference, Walsh was a part of a two-day meeting for TILE project participants.
See SLIS News stories on the 2008 and 2007 Digital Humanities Conferences:
Posted July 22, 2009