Virtual Vellum Overview

Project Team

• PI: Peter Ainsworth, University of Sheffield
• TA: Michael Meredith, University of Sheffield
• White Rose Grid Development Officer: Mike Griffiths
• Consultant: Colin Dunn, Scriptura Ltd (Oxford)

Project Website Areas

• Downloads
• Screenshots
• AG Collaborative Prototype
• Related Links

Project Description

Virtual Vellum is an e-Science demonstrator project that has been funded by EPSRC/JISC/Arts & Humanities e-Science Initiative and the UK e Science Core Programme with the aim of promoting and demonstrating the use of technology within arts and humanities research.

The aim of the project is to investigate technologies that facilitate the retrieval, manipulation and annotation/hotspotting of very high resolution image datasets (typically greater than 8k x 6k pixels). Each dataset may consist of many hundred images, such as those from digitised manuscripts. The Froissart Manuscript Project will provide the initial collection of images for the development process, however the viewing environment will provide a generic viewing tool for researchers and will be able to handle arbitrary image collections.

Flexibility in terms of accessing image datasets will be given by including the ability to retrieve data from a local hard drive, over the internet, and via a Data Grid using Storage Resource Broker (this will primarily make use of the White Rose Grid and the Worldwide Universities Network, WUN). Motivated by the potential bandwidth issues associated with retrieving large images over a network, the effectiveness of encoding the images as JPEG 2000 will be assessed and implemented within the project.

Further benefits and features of the Virtual Vellum project will include:

• Entirely written in Java Version 1.2 (this includes the JPEG 2000 decoder and multiple view user interface)
• Open source access to the viewing tool,
• Computer platform independence,
• Single and multiple views for comparing different images,

Virtual Vellum will therefore provide an ideal tool for collaborative Access Grid seminars and standalone conference presentations and lectures. There are already plans for it to be rolled out during a live medieval exhibition connecting the Royal Armouries at Leeds with its premises at the Tower of London and Louisville, Kentucky between April and June 2007. During the exhibition, the audience will be invited to use the viewing tool to interact with the Froissart manuscript images, which would otherwise be inaccessible because of the rare and fragile state of the original manuscripts.

Project Partners & Collaborators

• Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield
• Godfried Croenen, Associate Director, Froissart Project, University of Liverpool
• Anne D Hedeman, Professor of Medieval Art History, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Christiane Raynaud, Medieval Iconography, Université de Provence at Aix-Marseille
• Karen Watts, Senior Curator of Arms and Armour, Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds and London
• Jan Graffius, Curator, Stonyhurst College Library, Lancashire
  
• Karine Rebmeister, Curator and Conservator, Besançon Public Library
• Jocelyne Deschaux, Director, Curator and Conservator, Toulouse Public Library
• John Norman, Dir, Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies, Cambridge
• Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) “Reading the Medieval Book” research consortium
• White Rose “Medieval Book” research network at Sheffield, York and Leeds
• Humanities Research Institute, University of California at Irvine, and UoC San Diego