Image and text coupling for creating electronic books from manuscripts

We present here the first achievements of a Hypermedia Edit and Read Station (HERS) devoted to the browsing and the edition of hypermedia documents from literary material including document images. Concerning the edition, our purpose is twofold. First, capabilities are offered to transcribe manuscripts. Transcribing the text consists in coupling lines typed on the keyboard with their corresponding test lines in the manuscript images. A collaborative system based on computer-human interaction and document analysis is proposed for performing this task. Second, interactive tools are offered to organize the electronic document and establish hypermedia links between its different components (image areas, transcribed words or lines, or other kind of heterogeneous data). Concerning the browsing, we developed an approach based on information visualization in order to provide users with an idea of the overall organization of the hyperdocument and so to help them to navigate.