King's Digital Lab codebase for CROSSREADS palaeographic environment.

Annotating environment: https://kingsdigitallab.github.io/crossreads/annotator.html

CROSSREADS site: https://crossreads.web.ox.ac.uk/

Content

Annotating environment

The environment is a web application to assist CROSSREADS researchers with the creation of their palaeographic definitions and the annotation of graphs from inscriptions using those definitions.

The application runs on github pages and uses GITHUB API to update data files such as the annotation files or the definition file. In read-only mode, the application doesn't need the API. Images are obtained from a IIIF Image server. The collection of inscriptions is obtained from a DST endpoint. The text of the inscriptions is read from TEI files hosted on the IScicily repository.

Issues

See the github issue section and the milestones.

Develop

To install and run the app localy:

cd app
npm ci
npm start

Controlling which inscriptions are listed in the Annotator

A javscript command line app regenerates the DTS sub-collection to inscription listed in the annotator.

It takes two input files:

• inscriptions.js: an array of inscription IDs.
• collections.json: the full collection of inscriptions obtained from the DTS Poc in Nov 2022.

And produces collection.json a subset, or sub-collection, made by filtering the full collections.json with the shortlisted IDs.

Note that the IDs are case sensitive.

To add more inscriptions to the Annotator, add the desired IDs to the inscriptions.js file then ask a KDL developper to run the filtering script.

cd tools
npm ci
npm run collection:filter

Then, to publish the changes to the live annotator, run the deployment action on github.

More information

For more information about the data model, the architecture or the links to other services, please check the docs folder.

How to Cite

If you use this software in your work, please cite it using the following metadata.

@software{Noel_Crossreads_Digital_Palaeography_2026,
  author = {Noel, Geoffroy and Stoyanova, Simona and Jakeman, Neil and Prag, Jonathan},
  month = apr,
  title = {{Crossreads Digital Palaeography Environment}},
  url = {https://github.com/kingsdigitallab/crossreads},
  version = {1.0.0},
  year = {2026}
}

(bibtext above is automatically generated by Github from CITATION.cff)