Distributed Networks With/In Text Editing And Annotation

This chapter examines several commenting engines that have been developed and/or used by humanities scholars for text editing and annotation. It discusses factors that influence decision making in the creation of such tools; how they have been used by humanists; critical feedback produced by those scholars; and relevant recently funded projects. The primary foci for the chapter will be Brown Universitys Virtual Humanities Lab; the CommentPress engine; a commenting engine used by the Free Software Foundation; and the scholarly research tool Zotero, built at George Mason University in the US. It addresses some of the concerns raised thus far regarding the online publication and archiving of this form of knowledge work, and argues for its crucial role in todays humanities research. Keywords: annotation; Brown University; commenting engine; text editing; virtual humanities lab