Despina: The Mystery Specimen Viewer

Despina loads a MorphoSource IIIF Presentation 4.0 manifest, strips its title and descriptive metadata, and displays the resulting 3D/media content in an embedded viewer — so a specimen can be examined without revealing what it is.

What It Does

Paste a MorphoSource IIIF manifest URL and click Load Mystery Specimen. Despina:

1. Fetches the manifest JSON.
2. Removes identifying properties throughout the manifest tree: label (replaced with a generic "Mystery Specimen" placeholder), metadata, summary, requiredStatement, provider, homepage, logo, seeAlso, rendering, thumbnail, navDate, navPlace, partOf, and bodyValue.
3. Passes the scrubbed manifest, as a data: URI, directly to the Aleph + Universal Viewer embed — the same viewer/manifest-as-data-URI technique used by Manifestival — so nothing is re-hosted and no server-side component is required.

Use Copy Shareable Link to get a URL of the form ?manifest=<original manifest URL>. Opening that link re-fetches and re-scrubs the manifest client-side, so recipients see the same mystery specimen without ever seeing the original metadata.

Use Get Embed Code to copy an <iframe> tag pointing at embed.html?manifest=<original manifest URL> — a bare page with nothing but the mystery viewer, no Despina chrome — for dropping into another site or product. Like the shareable link, the embedded page fetches and scrubs the manifest itself at load time, so the snippet stays a normal-sized, static piece of HTML even for large manifests, and it re-scrubs on every load rather than freezing a stale copy.

Only textual metadata is scrubbed. The underlying model/image files are still served from MorphoSource under their original identifiers, so this is not a substitute for access control if you need to keep the specimen's identity fully confidential from a technically determined viewer.

Running Locally

npm install
npm start

Then open http://localhost:9002.

To build a production bundle:

npm run build

The output goes to dist/.

To run the manifest-scrubbing unit tests:

npm test

Tech Stack

• TypeScript, bundled with webpack
• No framework, no server — a static page that fetches manifests client-side

License

Apache 2.0