James Creel, Anton DuPlessis, and Laura Mandell presented the Cobre Tool at Digital Humanities 2014 in Lausanne Switzerland.

1. Distributed “Forms of Attention”:
eMOP and the CobreTool
Anton duPlessis, Laura Mandell, James Creel, and
Alexy Maslov
Texas A&M University
DH2014
July 10, 2014

2. Introduction
Distributed Reading

5. Causer, T., J. Tonra, and V. Wallace. “Transcription Maximized; Expense
Minimized?: Crowdsourcing and editing The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham.”
Literary and Linguistic Computing 27.2 (2012), pp. 119-137.
Causer, T., and V. Wallace. “Building a Volunteer Community: Results and Findings
from Transcribe Bentham.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 6.1 (2012).
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/2/000125/000125.html.
Gibbs, Frederick W. “New Textual Traditions from Community Transcription.” Digital
Medievalist 7 (2011). http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/7/gibbs/
Holley, Rose. “How Good Can It Get: Analysing and Improving OCR Accuracy in
Large Scale Historic Newspaper Digitisation Programs.” D-Lib Magazine 1.3/4
(2009).
---. “Many Hands Make Light Work.” March 2009. National Library of Australia. ISBN
978‐0‐642‐27694‐0

6. Guillory, John. “Close Reading: Prologue and Epilogue,”
ADE Bulletin 149 (2010): 8-14.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The
Generational Divide in Cognitive Models,” Profession 2007:
187-199.
Commentary
vs.
Contribution
Bruno Latour
{

7. • Developed for Los Primeros Libros Project
• an international collaboration to digitize and provide access to 16th Century
New World imprints (1539 – 1600)
• http://primeroslibros.org
• http://libros.library.tamu.edu
• Create opportunities for academic investigation and instruction
• Interface leverages scrolling filmstrip view of tiled thumbnails
• Magnification and comparison tools facilitate detailed examination
• View and compare multiple exemplars of the same work that would be
impossible with the physical books
• Compare state, emission, edition, etc. of an exemplar
• Examine variations in print, missing / obstructed text, missing / misnumbered /misbound /
damaged pages, fire marks, marginalia and other copy specific attributes
• Synchronous examination of multiple books permits parallel comparison

8. • Reading Tools
– Book View
– Reading View
– Detailed View
– Repository View
– Comparison View
• Quick Comparison View
• Annotations
– Structural
• table of contents
– Non-structural
• copy specific features
– Transcription
• capability to view and correct the
OCR output of a text
• Editing Tools
– Basic
– Canonical
• abstract construct that permits
alignment of different exemplars
of the same work by leveraging
the structural metadata
– Frankenbook
• application of the canonical
construct using images drawn
from any exemplar(s) to replace
the placeholders to create custom
editions via a drag and drop
method

17. • A systematic workflow for getting EEBO and
ECCO content and metadata into Cobre
• Accept existing OCR text as transcriptions in
XML import
• Editors for human transcription/revision of
pages
• Addition of transcriptions to XML export

19. • DSpace does not support bitstream (i.e. file)
level metadata of the detail required for
annotation and transcription.
• We include an additional bitstream that
contains metadata about the page-image
bitsreams – the Bitstream Metadata Bitstream
• The BMB is an XML file with “chunks” that
describe one or more pages.

20. A file attached to the
item
Example snippet of its
contents

22. Invoked with
a click

25. Administrative
users can
indicate
whether a
transcription
is vetted as
acceptable

26. Click this
And export
these

27. Results of Usability Studies
Confusions