Rainer Simon

As someone who has published books with 100+ images, here are my tips for finding free #earlymodern images (and tips for discounts when you have to pay for them!) 🗃️

sarahabendall.com/2020/03/11/e...

I love the scrollytelling format, and the visualizations by @nadiehbremer.com‬ are always the most engaging and beautiful 🤩 (Also we learn: if you need to get Google Trends results for more than 5 terms, you must normalize against the base bird!)

IIIF-Friday 13: IMMARKUS-workshop Verrassing: de dertiende IIIF-Friday vindt voor een keer op een maandag plaats! Tijdens deze editie maak je kennis met IMMARKUS, een annotatietool van KU Leuven die je helpt om slimmer met beeldcollec...

🖼️ #IIIF Fridays: Discover IMMARKUS, an annotation tool for working smarter with digital image collections (Cc: @aboutgeo.bsky.social). In this online session, @hildedw.bsky.social will demonstrate how IMMARKUS can support your workflow!

📅 30 March (14:00-16:00)
📝 Register: meemoo.be/nl/vormingen...

Big thanks to @atomotic.com for figuring out the IIPImage setup! 🙏

Real-time Collaborative Annotation for IIIF Collections Collaborate in real-time on IIIF image collections. Annotate, view, and explore high-resolution images with your team. Even without a login.

Sharing my suite of free & open-source tools for:

• real-time collaborative image annotation – liiive.now
• simple publishing of small-/mid image collections as #IIIF – github.com/rsimon/tiny-...

(If it's more than one tool it does count as a suite, right? :)

#DigitalHumanities

Decorative images with a screenshot of tiny.iiif in the background, and image server choices (as text labels) in the foreground: IIPImage, Cantaloupe.

Small update to #tinyIIIF, my no-nonsense #IIIF server! You can now choose your image server during setup:

• IIPImage
• Cantaloupe

Running small- to mid-sized collections? Teaching with IIIF materials? Building IIIF-enabled tools? Check out tiny.iiif!

github.com/rsimon/tiny-...

#DigitalFriday

Thanks for the shoutout :-) As it happens – my next post is almost on the way!

For the US #DigitalHumanities crowd: how does one go about looking for DH/DH-adjacent jobs? I live and work in Germany and know all the job boards and mailing lists to subscribe to here. But what about for the US scene? Specifically the Pacific North-West? Appreciate whatever help you can offer. 🙏

GitHub - rsimon/liiive: A tool for real-time collaborative IIIF image annotation. A tool for real-time collaborative IIIF image annotation. - rsimon/liiive

And now? It's up to you!

Clone the repo. Deploy your instance. Start annotating.

Most importantly: tell us how it goes. If something breaks, open a GitHub issue. If something feels unclear, confusing, slow — we want to know. Your feedback shapes where liiive goes next.

github.com/rsimon/liiive

The liiive annotation interface: image control bar on the top left (sharing, zoom, image rotation); drawing tool bar on the top right (move, rectangle, triangle, circle, trash, undo/redo), navigation bar at the bottom. Colored cursors and annotation shapes above a medieval manuscript page.

It's done! 🚀 The first formal open source release of liiive is out — my real-time collaborative #IIIF annotation environment.

As of today: fully self-hostable.

A big thank you to the University of Graz Department of Digital Humanities and the DHInfra.at initiative who's support made this possible.

The Waldseemüller map in liiive (a IIIF annotation tool).

Yay! The first image served from my new #tinyIIIF test instance.

I'm running it on a 2 CPU/4GB RAM VM. Seems to be the absolute minimum & performance is pretty slow.

If anyone has advice on which specs I'd need to get more #IIIF speed out of Cantaloupe – let me know!

Hint to those who want to use Vatican Lib resources in other viewers like #Mirador, #Theseus, or #IIIF tools like immarkus.xmarkus.org, liiive.now: I always found the IIIF link a bit well-hidden on the Vatican site. It's the tiny "i" icon top-left (next to "Read more"), then ↓, "IIIF manifest URI".

Planning for a postdoc in Classics using digital methods but don't know where to start? Join our training workshop in Durham!

Small bursaries are available, but applications are due soon!

#DigitalHumanities #digitalclassics

digitalhumanities.webspace.durham.ac.uk/events/

Quick Q: is anyone active in the Islandora ecosystem?

I realized just now there are Islandora/Drupal modules for text/image annotation using my open source libraries, but not sure if they're still maintained.

If you have contacts in that group: I'd love to chat about upgrading them!

I love it! Also: say "19th Century" and any LLM instantly seems to go into parchment-style sepia UI mode :-)

Screenshot of the (work in progress) tiny.iiif manifest editor.

The next release of #tinyIIIF will add a proper manifest editor for IIIF descriptive properties (label, metadata, summary, requiredStatement, rights, provider, navDate).

I just published v0.1.0 of tiny.iiif 🚀 - the first official release of my new IIIF server!

• Publish images as IIIF instantly
• Organize images with simple drag+drop
• Image Service + Presentation manifests + user-friendly GUI all in one package

Available now!
github.com/rsimon/tiny-...

YouTube video by Digital Humanities Craft Live Hands-On: coOCR/HTR. Ein Promptotype für "Editor in the Loop" Transkriptionsworkflows

coOCR/HTR, ein Research Preview. Browserbasiertes Werkzeug für OCR/HTR-Workflows, lokale und cloudbasierte Modelle, zweistufige Validierung. Experiment mit Claude Code + Promptotyping. Work in Progress, CC-BY.

Video: youtu.be/VJyhVc_ujeA

A screenshot of the tiny-iiif admin GUI.

New blog post: From Folder to Manifest in a Minute. An introduction into tiny-iiif, my new project that turns a folder of image files into a fully functional, online #IIIF manifest in a minute (or less!)

liiive.now/blog/2026-02...

GitHub - rsimon/tiny-iiif: Publish your images as IIIF in a minute - or less! Publish your images as IIIF in a minute - or less! - rsimon/tiny-iiif

tiny.iiif – my tiny (and so creatively named!) IIIF server now has a proper README to get you up and running instantly.

github.com/rsimon/tiny-...

Still a bit hacky & incomplete, but the basics work. I’ll be improving it over the next few weeks. Contributions welcome, feedback highly appreciated!

👍 There's also a dedicated React package for Annotorious 3, BTW (with types). If you’re missing anything, don't hesitate to drop a line on the Github issues tracker.

Annotorious v3? annotorious.dev - but it's not a drop-in replacement I'm afraid, but has a slightly different API and feature set.

Wonderful - I love to hear that. If you end up using liiive, do let me know. I'm really interested in hearing about your experiences with it :-)

liiive splash page image

Screenshot of the annotation interface, with toolbars (top-left, top-right, bottom-left), live user cursors and a medieval manuscript image with three annotations.

I can finally share the happy news 🚀 liiive.now — my tool for real-time collaborative annotation of #IIIF images — is going open source!

First code is available here: github.com/rsimon/liiive

Self-hosted setup coming by end of February.

#OpenSource #DigitalHumanities

It's a full IIIF server, batteries included so to speak. You can put it on a (virtual) server, and images + manifests get hosted directly from there. (Internally, it uses Cantaloupe as image server; manifests are just stored as JSON files, exposed on the web using NGINX.)

rsimo - Overview GitHub is where rsimo builds software.

github.com/rsimon/minim.... But the URLs going to change (now that I've got a proper name for it), and the admin UI isn't part of the Docker script yet. (You'll need to launch separately in dev mode.)

Thanks! Still very early days for this (started a week ago...) But if you're interested in trying it, let me know. (It's docker-based; setup should be more & less a one-liner; MIT licensed.)

Need to publish images as #IIIF — but have only 30 SECONDS to do it? tiny.iiif to the rescue! 🫨

• Drag & drop images → instant IIIF Image Service
• Create a folder → drag images in → instant presentation manifest!

Work in progress, but already a lot of fun. Ping me if you want to know more!

tiny.iiif table view

tiny.iiif grid view

tiny.iiif fullscreen preview

New side project is taking shape... #iiif

Great progress in our DH-RAG prototype #MachinaEmblematica <3 It works already quite well to explore the Latin texts and images.

Coming up next: analysis and evaluation of the retrieved contents and generated text to see how well the model actually performs!

Test it out at machina.ait.ac.at/chat/