On March 14th 2019, we were asked to attend library Jafet’s E-classroom which was an educational visit for most English courses. I was expecting the usual boring session on how to access AUB Libraries online, and how to specifically search the topic that you wanted some references that could support your thesis. But this time it was different, as soon as the students entered the E-classroom they were welcomed and overwhelmed by the two young ladies Vera Al Ashkar and Donna Rajeh who later on were going to introduce us to GIMP. They wanted to show us a different interface to assist our research and work throughout the courses at AUB and this was a very interesting one indeed. It is a new computer application that will tremendously help us ace our project by appeasing our analysis of the documents that were handed to us by Archives and Special Collections team the prior week. It is a great way to enhance the project and make it more attractive to viewers.
GNU Image Manipulation Program(GIMP) is a cross-platform image editor. Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done. It provides the tools needed for high quality image manipulation, from retouching to restoring to creative composites one can further enhance productivity thanks to many customization options available throughout the platform.
Additionally, the outcome of the session from the E-classroom workshop on GIMP will be very helpful while converting documents found in the library to digital documents. It is a very fascinating tool to use that is not complicated at all especially with the training we got in the E-classroom. You can download the platform on the following link: https://www.gimp.org/downloads/
Those tools will help us in our project through different widgets:
- Restore bad looking documents into good and clear texts
- Select a certain color and convert it into another one
- Crop a certain shape or image
- Remove ink or other damage
- Aligning horizontally text that are not horizontal
- And finally OCR:
The Optical Character Recognition or OCR is one of the major tools that we will be using during our research time. The mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document…
This is the ultimate tool for our research with the 1909 Petition. It will help us convert documents into texts, which we will then use on different digital platforms. One of these platforms would be Antconc to analyze and perform distant reading in the hope of exploring different perspectives of Orientalism.
To conclude the only tool that we will be using is OCR: after going through the different letters and documents on which we are basing our project, we realized that they are well preserved and thus won’t need other image processing tools.
We would have liked to portray some of them in these blogs, but we are waiting for the authorization to post such scanned documents on the web. Meanwhile, we hope that you are excited about the work we are planning to do as much as we are.
Hopefully we will be able to post our final timeline of the event by the end of the month!
Engl256D 