The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities is pleased to announce that we have been awarded a $400,000 NEH Preservation and Access grant to create the next generation of technical infrastructure supporting image-based editions and electronic archives of humanities content.

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, the Text Image Linking Environment, built on the existing code of MITH’s NEH-funded AXE image tagger, will dramatically increase the ease and efficiency of this work. MITH Director Neil Fraistat comments, “We’re delighted that the NEH is supporting the further development of MITH’s groundbreaking markup tool AXE and that Doug Reside, the developer of AXE, will be leading a distinguished multi-institutional team on the TILE project, along with Co-PI’s Dot Porter of the Digital Humanities Observatory (Irish Royal Academy) and John Walsh of Indiana University.”

At the end of two years, we will have produced software interoperable with other popular tools and capable of producing TEI-compliant XML for linking image to text and image to image with some level of automation. We will also put the image linking features of the newest version of the Text Encoding Standard (TEI P5) through it’s 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. According to Reside, “TILE attempts to create not just a set of tools but a methodology for generating truly useful software for humanities scholarship.”

Stay tuned for yet more exciting news from MITH about future projects resulting from our recent grant activity!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).