Update: The VCEditor 2.0 NEH DHAG has been terminated by DOGE as of April 2. We are actively seeking out alternative funding to undertake the work described below. If you are interested in helping to fund continued development of VCEditor, please contact the project PIs by email: dorp @ upenn.edu and alberto.campagnolo @ gmail.com

The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies is thrilled to announce that the VisColl team has received a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program to fund the VCEditor 2.0 Project. The grant will support work undertaken by staff in the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and the Penn Libraries Digital Library Development team. This funding will support the continued development of VCEditor functionality, including several of the most-requested additions: 

• Flipping models for manuscripts read right-to-left, enabling modeling for Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and other languages not currently supported by VCEditor;
• Descriptions for formats other than folio, including imposition visualizations, catering to specialists in early printed books;
• Individual notes, so users no longer have to hack the taxonomies for this purpose;
• The import and export of taxonomies, enabling users to share taxonomies across projects;
• Batch switching of hair/flesh tagging, which currently must be changed one leaf at a time;
• New types of visualizations;
• Enable the embedding of VCEditor diagrams in other websites.

In addition to the new functionality, the third year of the project will focus on education. We’ll be providing extensive documentation for users and organizing workshops aimed at specific audiences (book historians, conservators, catalogers, medievalists, etc.)

VCEditor (https://vceditor.library.upenn.edu/) is software developed through the VisColl project (https://viscoll.org/ ) that enables the modeling and visualization of codex manuscripts. The VisColl project is hosted and supported by the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (https://schoenberginstitute.org/ ) and the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts (https://www.library.upenn.edu/kislak) at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries (https://www.library.upenn.edu/). VisColl is directed by Dot Porter and Alberto Campagnolo.

We hope you’re as excited about the upcoming updates as we are. If you would like to receive updates as the project progresses, please join the VisColl mailing list by filling out the form here.