Arts and Humanities E-Science Support Centre

Virtual Workspace for the Study on Ancient Documents

The project will construct a virtual workspace for research involving decipherment and textual analysis of damaged and degraded ancient documents. It will provide direct access to widely scattered research resources such as dictionaries, corpora of texts and images of original documents, enabling the researcher to store, annotate and organize items in a personal workspace. The workspace will also support collaboration by allowing multiple researchers in separate locations to share a common view, working as if sat together, studying the original document. The project will deliver a working system that will enable a researcher to:

• Search across multiple, distributed data sets, images and text
• Select, store and organise items from the above, in a personal workspace
• Add annotations to these items to store personal thoughts and responses
• Support collaboration by allowing multiple researchers in separate locations to share a common view of the workspace, in conjunction with real time communication via Chat, VoIP and desktop integration with AccessGrid
• Allow a collaborator to comment, point/highlight, discuss and annotate the items in the shared workspace

Virtual Vellum

The 'Virtual Vellum' project at the University of Sheffield aims to facilitate access to high-end digitizations of folios of the Froissart Chronicles. Like the Oxford demonstrator, this enterprise builds on existing VRE development work, in this case the work done on Sheffield's Froissart Manuscripts Project. This demonstrator also deals with very rare, fragile and physically inaccessible material. The Froissart Chronicles themselves, an essential record of the Hundred Years War between England and France, can only be in one place at a time. Whenever they are moved from their local collection they must be accompanied by an expert curator and security staff, and be stored in a tightly controlled environment costing many thousands of pounds to purchase and run. Even when in their home collections, access for scholarly researchers, never mind the viewing public, is almost impossible. The Virtual Vellum project provides a medium, based on the White Rose Grid consortium, for online, real time viewing of the manuscripts that overcomes these problems. The project also brings a new, humanities-specific dimension to the VRE concept: a Grid-based exhibition of the manuscript folios alongside exhibits of the Royal Armories Museum (Leeds), which will be streamed on the White Rose Grid to the Tower of London, and the Royal Armories' premises at Louisville, Kentucky.