[tei-council] NASA looking to digitize Wernher von Braun's Notes

James Cummings james.cummings at oucs.ox.ac.uk
Wed Aug 12 08:11:49 EDT 2009


> It doesn't sound like it. I was about to propose a work plan. But you
> can do that as well as me. It doesn't seem too complex: basically a
> blurb about the TEI and standardisation; something about workflow
> including keying (it looks like we will be offering that at the TEI for
> approx. $1.50 a page), and then something about the different ways of
> editing material in XML--best text, apparatus, etc.

Hi,

I'm certainly happy to still be involved in this.  That 1.50 a page is, of course, going to be for clean typescript pages...right? I don't think really applies to his notebooks which are going to be significantly more difficult from the examples they give. (i.e. lots of hard to read marginal and interlinear additions/corrections/notes on poor typescript documents)  Do text-critical concepts like 'best text' and apparatus really apply here? Aren't there only one witness of his notebooks? (i.e. if he corrected the same report 4 times I think they want 4 versions of it rather than one reconstructed text with a critical apparatus.)

We're basically limited to 10 pages of explanation for the main document.  The things it occurs to me to include in such a document are:


- What is the TEI? And why is it appropriate?
- How does the TEI work as a standard (With references to similar projects maybe)?
- Something about the mixture of metadata for cataloguing and transcription in the same preservation format to be used to generate catalogues and web interfaces.
- What kind of textual phenomena can the TEI handle that appear in these documents? (Of top of head: multiple documents, add/del/subst, various alignment issues (e.g. checkmarks appearing in different locations to the underlined bit of text they are approving), various facsimile issues (marginal text that wraps around margin and changes direction of writing). 
- Note that one of the reasons that the TEI would be interested is that it wants to be able to encode such texts with no problems, if there are problems we want to find them.
- How does one customise the TEI or deal with things it can't do?
- What sort of workflow would be necessary for a project digitising his notes?
- A series of proposals for how this could be done (NASA/TEI/Various Institution Partnership, or NASA with TEI Consultancy, etc.)

Remember the 5 basic questions they want answered are (from http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/363386main_von_Braun_notes_RFI.pdf):


1. How should NASA catalogue the Weekly Notes? Do you have specific ideas on how to implement the approach or strategy?
2. What format(s) should the Weekly Notes be available in?
3. How should the Weekly Notes be indexed?
4. What timeframe do you expect this work to require?
5. What other strategies or approaches do you recommend that NASA pursue that would contribute to successful cooperation between NASA and other entities to create a successful and useful product from the Weekly Notes? Could these notes form the basis for understanding management best practices? Could engineering design and operational considerations be derived from these notes? Could these notes form the basis for formal classroom training?


My answers would be (also off top of head)
1. Using teiHeader for each individual document and generating catalogue records (for whatever cataloguing software they prefer) from these sources.  To store the master copy of the metadata about the document separate from the document is a backwards step.
2. Preservation forms in TEI XML and TIFF (or JPEG2000), with generated HTML with facing page zoomable JPEG. Possibly generated PDFs?
3. Author (often the reports he is commenting on are written by other people), Date, topics, perhaps relationship to particular projects? 
4. Depends on funding really. There are around 15,000 pages and they'll need to be keyed. Perhaps faster if keying company does  just the typescript and academic researchers add the notes and corrections in after? But if done in conjunction with academic institutions it sounds like a 3 year project at least to me.
5. Should collaborate with people like us! All of those suggestions are possible, but require significantly more encoding which slow the process down.


-James



More information about the tei-council mailing list