The dream and the cross: bringing 3D content in a digital edition

The Dream of the Rood is one of the earliest Christian poems in the corpus of Old English literature, and an example of the genre of dream poetry. While its complete text can be found in the 10th Century "Vercelli Book", the poem is considerably older, and its oldest occurrence is carved (in runes) on the 7-8th Century Ruthwell Stone Cross. In this paper, we present the prototype of a web-based digital edition of the Dream of the Rood, as it appears on the Ruthwell Cross. The multimedia framework presents the highly detailed 3D model acquired with 3D Scanning technology, together with the transcription and translation of the runes that can be found on its surface. The textual and spatial information are linked through a system of bi-directional links called spots, that give the possibility to the user to have a free navigation over the multimedia content, keeping the 3D and textual data synchronized. The proposed work provides discussion and solution on two main issues related to digital editions: the integration of three dimensional content in the context of the presentation on the web platform of heterogeneous multimedia data, and the creation of an XML encoding that could account for the necessities of 3D data disposition, but keeping the encoding rules in the context of the standards of the community.