Interactive Album of Mediaeval Palaeography
Collection of Transcription Exercises on Mediaeval Documents

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Technical information

Nota bene: this page provides technical information that might be useful to people aiming at creating a similar album or website. It is absolutely not necessary to read and understand this page if you simply want to take some transcription exercises.
To create those exercises, the areas have been placed on the images and associated with their transcription in Image Markup Tool (IMT), a free software. Then, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML files created in IMT have been trnasformed into XHTML with an XSLT program. A CSS stylesheet and a javascript file control how the exercises work. This "palaeography exercise creation kit" is freely available on the IMT website, under "Paleography" (free software).
The exercises of the album on this website have been created with this version of IMT, that generates XML TEI source files. But rather than publishing a static HTML export of those exercises, the XML TEI source files have been uploaded in a native XML database, eXist-db.
The website interface is written in PHP, that interacts with the eXist-db database via XML-RPC. The search function is provided by XQuery.
The XML TEI retrieved from the database is transformed into XHTML on the fly, through XSLT.
Album interactif de paléographie médiévale
Site pédagogique pratique proposé par l'axe transversal Digital Humanities (Humanités Numériques) de l'
UMR 5648 - Histoire, Archéologie, Littératures des Mondes Chrétiens et Musulmans Médiévaux