Too Fragile to Open, World’s Oldest Multicolor Printed Book Is Digitized

http://hyperallergic.com/228207/too-fragile-to-open-worlds-oldest-multicolor-printed-book-is-digitized/

by benbreen • 11 years ago

63 12 11 years ago

hyperallergic.com

x0x0• 11 years ago

it's astounding to look at something so delicate put together by human hands 380 years ago

these flowers are particularly catching: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-FH-00910-00083-00098/305

dublinben• 11 years ago

It's even more astounding that this library is asserting copyright on a nearly 400 year old document.[0] This material is unquestionably in the public domain.

[0]http://193.60.88.193/content/images/PR-FH-00910-00083-00098-...

kwhitefoot• 11 years ago

It is but the photographs might not be. In the US a straightforward photographic copy is not regarded as a work of art and hence is not copyrightable (see http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/about/copyright-issues.html), I'm not so sure the case law is so clear elsewhere. If you could somehow take your own pictures of it then you could certainly dedicate those to the public domain.

david-given• 11 years ago

Is a translation available? I'd rather like to know what the poems say.

(Also, I know someone who'd really like a nice facsimile edition. Er, other than me. Those birds are amazing.)

zariskij2• 11 years ago

Not poems. That's a list of the authors.

zariskij2• 11 years ago

If you meant the poems in the manual, those would be pretty hard to translate...

coldpie• 11 years ago

I think he meant in the manual, yes. For example page 12[1]. I don't have a good understanding of Chinese, ancient or otherwise; why would they be difficult to translate?

[1] http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-FH-00910-00083-00098/12

GauntletWizard• 11 years ago

The article gives absolutely no impression of the tech used to digitize it. It's made clear in the article that they did actually open it for the digitization (I was imagining a fanciful rig carefully sliding between pages to scan them), but it's basically a puff piece for the actual gallery, which is only linked at the end. Here's what you really want to see: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-FH-00910-00083-00098/1

My parents have some similar calligraphy watercolors; Korean in origin, though using chinese characters. They're quite a sight to behold (though not nearly as old), with fantastic use of minimalism and color to portray the life and depth of trees and birds.

userbinator• 11 years ago

I think they just opened it and took a picture of each page. According to the EXIF data in the images it was taken with a Phase One IQ180 - a very high-end 80MP digital camera that costs $40k+:

http://www.wired.com/2011/05/phase-one-iq180/

What I find annoying is that the viewer is yet another one of those JS-heavy web apps... when this could be done much simpler using a static page image gallery, or even better, a PDF. (Contrast it with the digital library at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006579 to see what i mean.)

The direct links to the high-res images (not the full 80MP, but ~3.5MP) are here:

http://193.60.88.193/content/images/PR-FH-00910-00083-00098-...

through

http://193.60.88.193/content/images/PR-FH-00910-00083-00098-...

madaxe_again• 11 years ago

So... How did they digitise it if they couldn't open it? X-rays? Article completely fails to answer its own title's mystique.

Edit: From the original article at Cambridge (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/news/oracle-bones-and-unseen-beauty...):

"Charles Aylmer, Head of the Chinese Department at Cambridge University Library, said: “This is the earliest and finest example of multi-colour printing anywhere in the world, comprising 138 paintings and sketches with associated texts by fifty different artists and calligraphers. Although reprinted many times, complete sets of early editions in the original binding are extremely rare.

“The binding is so fragile, and the manual so delicate, that until it was digitized, we have never been able to let anyone look through it or study it – despite its undoubted importance to scholars.”

So not too fragile to open, just too fragile to allow everybody who would like to to open it.

aeschylus• 11 years ago

[IIIF Protocol](iiif.io) at work.

It's finally getting easier to build browser-based, zooming viewers for these resources since the protocol has emerged.

At Stanford I work on [Mirador](http://projectmirador.org/), another interface to these resources (with a built-in tiling window manager). I hope that one day all large images on the web will be deep-zoomable through IIIF by default.

The internet archive is another institution with an underappreciated wealth of perennially relevant content. They have hundreds of thousands of JP2s of timeless artworks.

It will be a great boon when decent open source software exists for encoding and decoding JP2.

Those asking about the meaning of symbols/translations might be interested in the recent announcement of the [Open Annotation Protocol Specification](http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/) by the W3C.

Too Fragile to Open, World’s Oldest Multicolor Printed Book Is Digitized

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