Image and text coupling for creating electronic books from manuscripts

Presents the first achievements of HERS (Hypermedia Edit and Read Station), which is devoted to the browsing and editing of hypermedia documents from literary material including document images. Concerning the editing, our purpose as twofold. First, capabilities are offered to transcribe manuscripts. Transcribing the text consists of coupling lines typed on the keyboard with their corresponding text lines in the manuscript images. A collaborative system, based on computer-human interaction and document analysis, is proposed for performing this task. Second, interactive tools are offered to organize the electronic document and establish hypermedia links between its different components (image areas, transcribed words or lines, or other kinds of heterogeneous data). Concerning the browsing, we developed an approach based on information visualization in order to provide users with an idea of the overall organization of the hyperdocument and so help them to navigate through it.