MITH Software
The Versioning Machine is a software tool designed by a team of
programmers, designers, and literary scholars at MITH for displaying
and comparing multiple versions of texts. The display environment
seeks not only to provide for features traditionally found in
codex-based critical editions, such as annotation and introductory
material, but to take advantage of opportunities of electronic
publishing, such as providing a frame to compare diplomatic versions
of witnesses side by side, allowing for manipulatable images of the
witness to be viewed alongside the diplomatic edition, and providing
users with an enhanced typology of notes. The Versioning Machine
debuted at the 2002 ALLC/ACH (Association for Literary and
Linguistic Computing/Association for Computers and the Humanities)
Conference in Tübingen, Germany, July 2002. Version 1.0 was released
July 2003. Version 2.0 was released December, 2003.
The Virtual Lightbox is a software tool for comparing images online.
It exists in two versions, an application and an applet (both
programmed in Java). The applet version, which is newly developed,
furnishes what we believe to be an extremely flexible environment
for online image comparison. Its primary audience is developers who
wish to add an image comparison tool to a Web-based image collection.
Simple server-side scripting allows users to populate the Lightbox
applet in any number of ways. The application version, which was
developed earlier, allows users to share images in peer-to-peer
fashion: all users participating in a common session see the same
images in the same on-screen configuration at the same time.
Movement of an image and other operations are all globally propagated
in realtime. Thus the application version functions as an image-based
whiteboard.