Linking Page Images to Transcriptions with SVG
This paper will present the results of ongoing experimentation with the linking of manuscript images to TEI transcriptions. The method being tested involves the automated conversion of images containing text to SVG, using Open Source tools. Once the text has been converted to SVG paths, these can be grouped in the document to mark the words therein and these groups can then be linked using standard methods to tokenized versions of the transcriptions. The goal of these experiments is to achieve a much more fine-grained linking and annotation mechanism than is so far possible with available tools, e.g. the Image Markup Tool and TEI P5 facsimile markup, both of which annotate only rectangular sections of an image. The method envisioned here would produce a legible tracing of the word, expressed in XML, to which transcripts and annotations might be attached and which can be superimposed upon the original image.