In March 2017, we installed a V-shaped book cradle for the Seminar on Textual Editing and Criticism (SECRIT) / Institute for Bibliographic Research and Textual Criticism (IIBICRIT) at Conicet. The project's goal was to digitize 29 volumes of the "Revista Incipit" as part of the "Digitization of the bibliographic holdings of the Seminar on Textual Editing and Criticism" project. The journal was published only in print from 1978 to 2009.
The device used to digitize the volumes is a V-shaped book cradle that uses two compact digital cameras connected to a computer. The low-cost cradle was developed by Bibliohack and uses pinewood slats as the structural element and clear acrylic as the document flattening medium. To capture the images, we used Bibliohack’s "Dalclick" software, which controls the cameras remotely and allows for previewing the result. Post-processing was done with free software on a GNU/Linux platform (Tesseract OCR, Scantailor, and PDFBeads) operated through our "Dalproc" system, which enables batch execution of all stages. The process ends with a PDF file ready to publish online.
Bibliohack trained members of SECRIT in the use of the device and the post-processing software. Digitization was carried out by Gabriela Striker, Ileana Campagno, and Agustina Miguens.
The Revista Incipit "publishes original contributions devoted to the problems and methods of editing and textual criticism of works in Spanish from the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas, from the Middle Ages to the present day, as well as news from archives and bibliographic repositories, and topics on language, structure, and style related to texts or their textual history."
All issues digitized in this project are currently available in open access (under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license) on the institute's open publication system.
Image gallery
More information about this project
"The digitization project of the Incipit journals": PDF of the presentation by Gabriela Striker, Agustina Miguens, and Ileana Campagno Pizarro (UBA) at the "Archive Design and Construction" panel coordinated by Juan Mendoza, during the III International Congress of the Argentine Association of Digital Humanities held in Rosario, November 7–9, 2018.
"The 'Humanistic Informatics': passing notes from the Hispanic world" An article from "Revista Incipit" in PDF, showing a sample of the final digitization result.
"Incipit Project Report" Report prepared by Gabriela Striker, Agustina Miguens, and Ileana Campagno detailing the project execution, challenges faced, and suggestions for improving the process developed by Bibliohack.
