Slides for paper given at the Digital Humanities conference in Lausanne (DH 2014).

1. Mixed data, mixed audience: building
a flexible platform for the Visionary
Cross project
Digital Humanities 2014
Lausanne, 7-12 July 2014
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco
Università di Torino / Università di Pisa
roberto.rossellidelturco@unito.it
rosselli@ling.unipi.it

2. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
The Visionary Cross Project
● an international project:
 University of Leeds, UK (C. Karkov)
 University of Lethbridge, CA (D. O’Donnell, J. Graham)
 Università di Torino, Italy (R. Rosselli Del Turco)
 ISTI-CNR, Italy (M. Callieri, M. Dellepiane)
● multidisciplinary approach
● main goal: producing an integrated edition of
Anglo-Saxon monuments and texts
● web site: http://www.visionarycross.org/

3. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Ruthwell Cross
● Dumfriesshire,
Scotland
● first half of VIII c.
● site of an ancient
Roman fort
● about 5.30m h
● rectangular base
● figurative panels
● runic inscriptions
● celtic decorations
● 1642: pulled down
and broken
● rebuilt 1802 by Rev.
Duncan
● moved into the abse
in 1887

4. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Ruthwell Church

5. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Ruthwell Cross
Originally built outside the church,
rebuilt in a close-by position, then
moved inside

6. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Bewcastle Cross
● Cumbria, England
● first half of VIII c.
● religious community
on the site of an
ancient Roman fort
● about 4.50m h
● square base
● figurative panels
● runic inscriptions
● celtic decorations
● sundial
● weather/lychen
damages

7. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Bewcastle Church

8. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Bewcastle Church

9. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Bewcastle Cross

10. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Bewcastle Cross

11. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
The Brussels Cross
● St. Michael and
Gudula Cathedral,
Brussels, Belgium
● ancient reliquary end
of X century
● about 46x28cm
● wooden structure
● front plate in gold,
stolen at the end of
the XVIII c.
● silver foil on sides
and back
● inscriptions in Old
English on the sides
● symbols of the four
evangelists

12. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
The Vercelli Book
● manuscript dating back to the end of the 10th
century, containing miscellaneous religious
works, in verse and prose
● 136 folios of very thin parchment
● written by a single scribe in Anglo-Saxon square
minuscule
● 23 homilies and 6 poetic works
● together with Exeter Book, Ms Junius, Ms Cotton
Vitellius A XV one of the most important OE mss
● still unclear how it arrived in Vercelli about XII c.
● preserved in the Biblioteca Capitolare di Vercelli
● a full scan is available thanks to the Digital
Vercelli Book project (http://vbd.humnet.unipi.it/)

13. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
The Vercelli Book
The Dream of the Rood Elene

14. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Dumfries Peninsula

15. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Complex relations among objects

16. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Ruthwell Cross 2D/3D scan (April 2012)

17. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
The original plan
in the beginning, we envisioned an edition of the
two standing crosses and of The Dream of the
Rood
separate editions with links between 3D objects
and poetic texts
navigation within a single web site, different UI for
different objects
this plan proved inadequate, both because new
objects were added, and above all for
methodological reasons
specific technical problems also related with
multidisciplinary issues

18. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Chaos awaits … (courtesy of J. van Zundert)

19. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
1. Heterogeneous material
an edition of Anglo-Saxon texts together with the
manuscript scans is not a particular problem
(http://vbd.humnet.unipi.it/beta/)
in the case of the Visionary Cross project, though, we
have to deal with very different objects:
standing crosses → 3D models
Brussels Cross → photos, 3D model
Vercelli Book → manuscript scans
runic inscriptions → 3D, but also text (TEI XML)
poetic texts → TEI XML
needed: a flexible environment to integrate the
separate components and expose all the connections
critical feature: navigation, inter-object linking

20. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Combining text and 3D model

21. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Text and context

22. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
2. A single version for the edition?
a problem faced as soon as we had a working
prototype
crucial question: who are our users? what are they
going to do with the edition?
two extremes:
a simple 3D viewer based on the SpiderGL library
(http://spidergl.org/)
Meshlab (http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/)
User Interface and navigation problems
different features available for different types of
users? Is a unified UI going to work?

23. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Measuring tools

24. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Ligthing

25. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Radiance scaling

26. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Movement 1

27. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Movement 2

28. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Roadmap to the edition(s)
first step: “teaching edition” of RC
to be followed by a “research edition”, richer in
functionality and with an adjusted UI → same
code base, different widget offer/layout
a virtual environment on three levels:
outside church (Google Earth)
inside church (UDK)
single object (3D Viewer)
user testing: currently finishing a first trial,
feedback is very important to us

29. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project

30. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project

31. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Rune text experimental edition

32. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Experimental readability enhancing

33. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Experimental runic fragment edition in TEI XML

34. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Ruthwell Church as a virtual environment

35. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
The final edition(s)
full 2D/3D integration, flexible UI
an open edition:
expansible framework
unnegotiated access to our data
a social edition:
local community
extended community
a distributed edition:
framework on different servers
MESA network (http://mesa-medieval.org/)

36. Mixed data, mixed audience: the Visionary Cross project
Conclusion
our roadmap may look … tentative
in our experience, though, it’s the only suitable
path allowing us to build both the technical and
methodological tools to deploy the edition
we will need quite a lot of experimenting and of
user testing to refine the UI
all the more so when we will start to combine
the different editions together (→ Bewcastle
Cross scan)