Layered Manuscript Viewers

[Stephen Parsons]

Hello all,

I saw a cool example of using layers in the Mirador viewer, and wanted to share some similar work from the University of Kentucky that might be of interest.

We built a layered Registered Image Viewer and used it on a dataset of the St. Chad Gospels, so that we could look at particular areas on individual pages and see how they have changed over time. There is a live demo up here. It's even built with some of the same tools as Mirador, like OpenSeadragon. The main difference from the example above is that we went for a "spotlight" to look at one part of the page at a time, rather than fading the entire view from one version to another.

We really like our viewer but so far we've primarily built it around one dataset. I could imagine it might be fruitful to incorporate some of our ideas/data into a more established platform like Mirador. If there is mutual interest, we might be able to make this a research project for students here. Let me know if you have any thoughts!

Best,

Stephen

P.S. Extra links:
- Layered viewer code
- St. Chad Gospels raw data on Internet Archive

- Paper on the layered viewer and related image registration (could send PDF by request)

- Our registration-toolkit we use for aligning manuscript images