Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 452.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2003 07:28:05 +0000
From: Matt Kirschenbaum <mk235@umail.umd.edu>
Subject: virtual lightbox release
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January 31, 2003
We are pleased to announce a new release of the Virtual Lightbox, a
software tool for comparing images online:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/products/lightbox/
Begun at the University of Kentucky, this project is now supported by
the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the
University of Maryland.
The Virtual Lightbox exists in two versions, an application and an
applet (both programmed in Java). The *applet* version, which is newly
developed, furnishes what we believe to be an extremely flexible
environment for online image comparison. Its primary audience is
developers who wish to add an image comparison tool to a Web-based image
collection. Simple server-side scripting allows users to populate the
Lightbox applet in any number of ways. A live demo of the applet is
available here:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/products/lightbox/sistine/example.html
The *application* version, which was developed earlier, allows users to
share images in peer-to-peer fashion: all users participating in a
common session see the same images in the same on-screen configuration
at the same time. Movement of an image and other operations are all
globally propagated in realtime. Thus the application version functions
as an image-based whiteboard.
Comparison, which John Unsworth calls a "scholarly primitive," is a
basic and probably intuitive operation that is nonetheless not well
supported--for images anyway--by conventional Web browser technology.
That is, users have no ability to move, juxtapose, or otherwise
reposition images beyond the configuration in which they are delivered
by a static page layout. As rich image collections continue to come
online, it's becoming increasingly apparent that end-users lack the
tools to exploit such resources to their full potential. The Lightbox is
one attempt to meet this need. Though its target audience is in the
academic humanities and the library and museum community, we expect the
Lightbox to find users far removed from this sphere; indeed, we
anticipate it will be of interest to anyone for whom images constitute
an important data type.
The Virtual Lightbox joins the recently released Versioning Machine as a
free and open source MITH Product, distributed under the terms and
conditions of the GNU General Public License. For more about MITH,
please visit its homepage:
Comments, questions, and bug reports may be addressed to:
lightbox-feedback@mith2.umd.edu
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Amit Kumar, Susan Schreibman
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Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
January 31, 2003
We are pleased to announce a new release of the Virtual Lightbox, a
software tool for comparing images online:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/products/lightbox/
Begun at the University of Kentucky, this project is now supported by
the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the
University of Maryland.
The Virtual Lightbox exists in two versions, an application and an
applet (both programmed in Java). The *applet* version, which is newly
developed, furnishes what we believe to be an extremely flexible
environment for online image comparison. Its primary audience is
developers who wish to add an image comparison tool to a Web-based image
collection. Simple server-side scripting allows users to populate the
Lightbox applet in any number of ways. A live demo of the applet is
available here:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/products/lightbox/sistine/example.html
The *application* version, which was developed earlier, allows users to
share images in peer-to-peer fashion: all users participating in a
common session see the same images in the same on-screen configuration
at the same time. Movement of an image and other operations are all
globally propagated in realtime. Thus the application version functions
as an image-based whiteboard.
Comparison, which John Unsworth calls a "scholarly primitive," is a
basic and probably intuitive operation that is nonetheless not well
supported--for images anyway--by conventional Web browser technology.
That is, users have no ability to move, juxtapose, or otherwise
reposition images beyond the configuration in which they are delivered
by a static page layout. As rich image collections continue to come
online, it's becoming increasingly apparent that end-users lack the
tools to exploit such resources to their full potential. The Lightbox is
one attempt to meet this need. Though its target audience is in the
academic humanities and the library and museum community, we expect the
Lightbox to find users far removed from this sphere; indeed, we
anticipate it will be of interest to anyone for whom images constitute
an important data type.
The Virtual Lightbox joins the recently released Versioning Machine as a
free and open source MITH Product, distributed under the terms and
conditions of the GNU General Public License. For more about MITH,
please visit its homepage:
Comments, questions, and bug reports may be addressed to:
lightbox-feedback@mith2.umd.edu
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Amit Kumar, Susan Schreibman
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