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The right team, the right tool

Image transcription is a complicated task. As early as the 1990s, the visionaries who imagined the tool sought a way to leverage the power of the digital images of medieval manuscripts to accelerate research and encode scholarly behavior. As more use cases were accommodated and the tools became more generalized, the TPEN platform emerged as a way for scholars, researchers, students, and hobbyists to transcribe and annotate all sorts of digitized documents that evaded simple character recognition tools.

Digital Scholarship at Saint Louis University

TPEN is hosted on servers at Saint Louis University (SLU) and maintained by developers in the Research Computing Group within the Office for the Vice President for Research. Many contributors have supported the code, the infrastructure, and the community over the years.

Alumni

Legacy

"old TPEN logo" The original Transcription for Paleographical and Editorial Notation (T‑PEN) project was coordinated by the Center for Digital Theology at (SLU) and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the NEH. The Electronic Norman Anonymous Project developed several capabilities at the core of this project’s functionality. Dr. Jim Ginther (PI) and Dr. Abigail Firey (co-PI) supervised the team that released the first complete platform at t-pen.org in 2010.

License and Rights

TPEN 3 by Research Computing Group is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

CC-BY CC-BY

Users and machines who interact with TPEN and its services are expected to be well-behaved citizens of the open web. The license above describes this code and its related repositories but does not explicitly cover the code or content related platforms, such as https://rerum.io. This open source code contains other libraries that also contain licenses that may include different liberties and restrictions.

Contributors to any of the TPEN repositories must accept this license, though no requirement is in place for anyone who clones this repository or otherwise modifies the code for themselves.

User Agreement

As a TPEN User, you agree to use TPEN tools, services, APIs, and websites for their intended purpose. Illegal or unethical activities, including violation of intellectual property rights, harassment, or theft and abuse of resources are prohibited.

TPEN will maintain an amicable and cooperative community, which may include suspension of accounts, though we will act reasonably to preserve any data you may want to recover.

User information and project configurations will be stored on servers at Saint Louis University (SLU). While a valid email account is required to receive communications from TPEN, no personal information is required, verified, or transmitted to any other entities. Users who connect external identities to their TPEN accounts will be responsible for ensuring that any information they provide is accurate.

User authentication is managed through the SLU Rerum client at Auth0.com. TPEN does not require or control any information provided to Auth0.com (social login, SMS number, etc.) in order to activate additional authentication options.

User contributed content includes all transcription fragment bounding, text content, and descriptive annotations. While much of the context is obscured through non-obvious URIs until intentionally published or directly shared, it is all encoded and available for readonly access immediately as Linked Open Usable Data in the public RERUM repository. By default, the CC BY 4.0 license is applied to all content, though modifications made per project configuration will be applied to all published content. While TPEN may use transcription content for non-commercial purposes, especially in the context of sharing back with repository owners, proper user attribution and rights statements will always be intact.

Resources being annotated are not necessarily hosted or owned by TPEN and any available rights statements will be visible to viewers of the project. TPEN does not make any non-automated efforts to verify the right to annotate resources and relies on users to act responsibly.

TPEN does not share user information and will never publish any information except the Agent URI that identifies you in RERUM. While individuals have the right to release any additional information by appending information to their own public profile, this is never required.

Funding and Partnerships

This project, directly funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), is the result of intense support over decades of work and several iterations of this platform. Funding and support has come from foundations, organizations, and individuals, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the University of Dayton, and the University of Kentucky, the Newberry Library, Stanford University Libraries, and the International Image Interoperability Framework Consortium.

Additionally, we want to express our gratitude for the repositories which opened up their collections early on to allow this project and others like it to take root: