Traherne Digital Collator
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News: Release of Traherne Digital Collator v3
The Oxford Traherne and the Visual Geometry Group at Oxford are pleased to announce a major new release of their jointly developed Traherne Digital Collator software.
The Oxford Traherne in collaboration with the Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford, has developed a new digital collator designed for the needs of textual scholars and scholarly editors. A major new version (3.0) has been released in September 2026. For free download of the Traherne Digital Collator software, user instructions for v3.0, and detailed specifications of its related camera equipment, please see below.
Collation is the process of comparing different copies of the same text in order to identify variants between them, and is a crucial part of scholarly editing, both for establishing an accurate text and for understanding the history of the printing process. This has often been done in the past using an optical collator, typically consisting of a pair of plane mirrors which can be manually adjusted so that images of two different copies are quasi-superimposed by the brain, allowing differences between them to stand out. While this method has achieved good results, it is both time-consuming and tiring to the user.
The Oxford Traherne, in collaboration with Professor Andrew Zisserman FRS, Joon Son Chung, Dr Abhishek Dutta, and Prasanna Sridhar (Visual Geometry Group, Engineering Science, Oxford), and with initial input from Dr Christopher Palmer (Balliol College, Oxford), has developed the Traherne Digital Collator, an innovative digital collation system, which is easier to use than existing methods of optical collation, enables faster and more detailed textual comparison, and makes it possible to analyse the printed text in ways not previously possible. It has transformed the scholarly editing process, and become a standard research tool, used by major editorial projects across the world.
The software employs computer vision technology to automatically resize and overlay pages of books and other printed matter, correcting for differences in scale, perspective and page curvature. It can offer a choice of several different visualizations of the variants, including transparent overlay, two-colour channels, and a toggle.
Diff mode, showing base image in blue and comparison image in red
Collation should not be divorced from examination of the original volume, and we have therefore also designed associated image capture equipment. This enables the Traherne Digital Collator to be used either in libraries by displaying live images of the physical volume on a laptop for comparison with another image set, or remotely using two or more image sets.
The Traherne Digital Collator has been through several stages of trial and refinement. It is freely available to colleagues from other scholarly editing projects, and this wider network of scholars have contributed to its development with their feedback. In September 2026, we released version 3.0 of the collator which uses the familiar user interface with some improvements, and which runs directly in a browser with no installation required.
A demonstration of the software, discussion of how it is used by editors, and examples of some of the discoveries which it has enabled, can be found here, in a recording of a seminar given by Dr Austen Saunders and Professor Rob Whalen to the Traherne Online Research Network.
For an account of a major scholarly project’s experience of using the Traherne Digital Collator, see the blog post by Harriet Phillips of The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne.
If you use our collator, we encourage you to send your comments to the general editor, Dr Julia Smith.
The software and subsequent updates are available for free download via a dedicated webpage here, which also gives information about system requirements.
Download the user instructions here:
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The associated image capture equipment is available to order: for a full description, specifications, pricing, and order information, please click here.
The Traherne Digital Collator and camera equipment in use
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The development of the collation project is supported by the Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute, the Lynne Grundy Memorial Trust, and EPSRC Programme Grant Seebibyte.
- Left image: Wall painting of man digging, the Old House, Hereford, 1620s, detail (DP042325): © English Heritage
- Right image: Osborn MS b308, p. 131 (‘Select Meditations’, III.42): The James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
