Thursday, October 30, 2008

Beyond text

If you are interested in the architecture of scholarly resources, run, don't walk, to Gabe Weaver's new sourceforge site, episteme. The nascent site (opened to coincide with the public release of "digital product" from the Archimedes Palimpsest project) documents his work representing and manipulating information encoded as mathematical diagrams.

There's already a lot to think about here, but one intriguing aspect is that entities in figures are referred to with identifiers that can be coordinated with canonical references to passages of textual content from the same document. (Short-term consequence for me personally — urgent need to re-think my presentation for the "Text and Graphics" panel at next week's TEI meeting in London. Ouch.)

Oh, and if you just want to enjoy some beautiful drawings, there's an Easter egg with a larger display of the image above — a collage of figures from book 1 of Archimedes' treatise On Floating Bodies. You can see it here.

(Updated Oct. 31: Episteme now includes interactive eye candy, too.)