14.0614 film scanners & image mappers?

From: by way of Willard McCarty (willard@lists.village.Virginia.EDU)
Date: Wed Jan 24 2001 - 02:07:44 EST

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 614.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   <http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
                  <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

             Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 07:04:37 +0000
             From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
             Subject: film scanners & image mappers?

    I would very much appreciate words of experience if not wisdom on the
    subject of film scanners and image mappers.

    I am involved in a LOW budget (i.e. the out-of-our-own-pockets kind of)
    project dealing with mss images from microfilm. Eventually the mss may be
    re-photographed, but at the moment we're dealing with standard reels of
    microfilm supplied by such libraries as the British Library and the
    Staatsbibliothek in Munich. The object is to construct an extended
    prototype of an electronic edition involving a few hundred mss pages. The
    higher-end scanners are simply out of reach, so we'd like to acquire a
    scanner costing less than 200 pounds sterling. (STOP LAUGHING!)
    Conventional wisdom is that flatbed scanners with film attachments or
    provisions are not good enough for the purpose, though the Agfa SnapScan
    e50 (1200 x 2400 ppi true optical resolution, 42-bit colour sampling)
    sounds fairly good. Does anyone know that scanner?

    For image mapping I have used Live Image to draw free-form boxes around
    areas of the mss pages. The areas to be captured are irregular, sometimes
    smudged, so I suspect that automatic methods of pinpointing lines of
    handwritten text would not work. Recommendations most welcome.

    The prototype will be built by hand using HTML -- at least until we
    understand better the scope of what we want the edition to do. Comments
    welcome.

    Many thanks.

    Yours,
    WM

    -----
    Dr Willard McCarty / Senior Lecturer /
    Centre for Computing in the Humanities / King's College London /
    Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. /
    +44 (0)20 7848-2784 / ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/



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