Review
Developed by the University of Victoria’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre in Canada, Image Markup Tool is an open-source software utility for describing different elements present in an image using XML. With this tool you will be able to create your own categories of images, classify your annotations, and add as many of them as you need to more than 45 types of images, including TIFF, JPG, PNG, GIF, and WMF.
Though traditionally used to mark up all kinds of text, XML has once again proven to be capable of tagging almost anything. In this program, XML is used to add a title to the image and, what is more important, to append any number of annotations to specific sections of it.
The XML used relies on the P5 Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI), a well known worldwide standard. Thus, you can select any element in an image (regardless of its size and position) and describe it fully by adding any information you consider relevant. This information can either be transcriptional (a verbatim transcription of text present in the image) or written using your own words. In any case, you can define different categories to classify your annotations, which will result in different boxes of different shapes and colors (which can be customized if desired). You can always overlap your annotations (or boxes) if one of the elements happens to fall into more than one category or shares annotations with other elements.
One of the main aims of the project’s developers when designing this tool was to create a program that could be extremely easy and simple to work with, especially for the novice user. Actually, that is what it is - you do not need to be a TEI, XML, or schema expert to use Image Markup Tool, it is as simple as drawing boxes in your image files and adding text to them. Once the job is done, this comprehensive application is also capable of creating a full webpage with both the image and all the information associated with it, to help you share it on the Internet, known as the “Web View”. |
