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/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed Jan 24 2001 - 02:19:44 EST