Some papers of H. Plantinga that are available on-line:

Digital Facsimile Editions and On-Line Editing [Poster]

Digitizing a large collection of books is an expensive and time-consuming task-but there may be volunteers all over the world who are willing to do a small portion of the task. This poster describes a system for making digital facsimile editions-e-books consisting of page images and OCR'ed but uncorrected text. The user can choose to view low or high resolution page images or text for each page or search the text. Authenticated users with little or no training can correct the text on-line, and the corrections are incorporated in the document. Source code is available for the described implementation, which is a part of the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (http://www.ccel.org). pdf

ThML: Theological Markup Language for the Christian Classics Ethereal Library

This document describes the Theological Markup Language (ThML), an XML markup language for theological texts. ThML was developed for use in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL), but it is hoped that the language will serve as a royalty-free format for theological texts in other applications. Key design goals are that the language should be (1) rich enough to represent information needed for digital libraries and for theological study involving multiple, related texts, including cross-reference, synchronization, indexing, and scripture references, (2) based on XML and usable with World Wide Web tools, (3) automatically convertible to other common formats, and (4) easy to learn and use. ThML is defined as an XML DTD that extends the Voyager DTD for HTML. html, pdf.

Techniques for the Coordinated Study of Multiple Electronic Texts

This paper addresses the problem of the simultaneous, coordinated study of two or more texts, such as a book with a table of contents, index, notes, translation, lexicon, or different edition. I identify meta-data that facilitates this kind of synchronized study by computer. With the relevant meta-data it is possible to load texts into relational database tables in such a way that all of the synchronization operations may be expressed as database operations such as selects and joins. Finally, I propose several tools that would facilitate this kind of synchronized study on the world wide web. pdf

Christianity and Computer Science at Wheaton College [Short essay].

Note: this was written while I was at Wheaton College, but it is more broadly applicable. -- html

Digital Libraries and Large Text Documents on the World Wide Web

Electronic Publishing and the Information Superhighway (DAGS' 95). This paper describes the method I use for addressing and accessing small sections of a large HTML document, with a CGI program called a "pager". html

An Asymmetric, Semi-adaptive Text Compression Algorithm

IEEE Data Compression Conference, March 1994. This paper presents a compression algorithm that takes hours to compress large files but decompresses very quickly and achieves better compression ratios than algorithms like those used by zip or gzip for some kinds of files including text files. This algorithm would be especially appropriate for applications such as electronic books, where files may be accessed in compressed form many times. pdf

Conservative Visibility Preprocessing for Efficient Walkthroughs of 3D Scenes

This paper discusses a visibility preprocessing algorithm for interactive 3D graphics. This makes interactive walkthroughs or flybys more efficient. This paper appeared in Graphics Interface '93, pp. 166-173. pdf

An Algorithm for Finding the Weakly Visible Faces from a Polygon in 3D

Polygons in a polygonal scene are said to be weakly visible from a point if any point of the polygon is visible. They are said to be weakly visible from a polygonal region if they are weakly visible from any point in that region. This paper gives an algorithm for finding the weakly visible faces from a polygonal region in O(n⁴ log n) runtime. This paper appeared in the Fourth Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, 1992, pp. 45-51. pdf, HTML

Visibility, Occlusion, and the Aspect Graph

With C. R. Dyer. This paper catalogs the ways the topology of the image of a polyhedron changes with changing viewpoint. It is then possible to find maximal regions of viewpoints of the same aspect. These techniques are used to construct the viewpoint space partition (VSP), a partition of viewpoint space into maximal regions of constant aspect, and its dual, the aspect graph. This paper presents tight bounds on the maximum size of the VSP and the aspect graph and give algorithms for their construction, first in the convex case and then in the general case. The algorithms make use of a new representation of the appearance of polyhedra from all viewpoints, called the aspect representation or asp. International Journal of Computer vision 5(2), 1990, pp. 137-160. pdf

Real-Time Hidden-Line Elimination for a Rotating Scene

With W. Brent Seals and C. R. Dyer. This paper discusses the problem of displaying a rotating polyhedral scene with hidden line removal. An algorithm is presented that pre-computes visibility information, so that the on-line rotation phase is about as it would be without hidden line removal. pdf

The Asp: A Continuous, Viewer-centered Representation for 3D Objects

Ph.D. Thesis, University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1988. A new, continuous, viewer-centered object representation called the aspect representation is introduced, examined, applied, and generally beaten to death. Applications are constructing the aspect graph, object recognition, and animating rotation. pdf

An Algorithm for Computing the Aspect Graph

With C.R. Dyer. Proc. 27th Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science, 1986, pp. 123-131.