The dream and the cross: A 3D scanning project to bring 3D content in a digital edition

The Dream of the Rood is one of the earliest Christian poems in Old English and an example of the genre of dream poetry. While a 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- to 8th-century Ruthwell Stone Cross. In this article, we present the work done in the framework of the "Visionary Cross" project, starting from the digitization of the Ruthwell Cross to the creation of a web-based digital edition of The Dream of the Rood, as it is carved on the Cross. The 3D data has been collected and processed with the explicit aim of creating a multimedia framework able to present the highly detailed digital 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 bidirectional links called Spots, which allow the users to navigate freely over the multimedia content, keeping the 3D and textual data synchronized. The present work discusses the different issues that arose during the work, from digitization and processing to the design of a tool for the integration of three-dimensional content in the context of the presentation on the web platform of heterogeneous multimedia data. We end with the difficulties involved in the creation of an XML encoding that could account for the necessities of the visualization system but remain within the scholarly encoding standards of the relevant disciplinary community.