Archeologies of Reading: Modeling and Recreating the Annotation Practices of Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, Jacques Derrida, and the Winthrop Family

This panel brings together three projects that explore and analyze annotated texts in digital environments: The Archeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe, The Winthrop Family on the Page, and Derrida’s Margins: . All three projects seek to give users the experience of how another person read their books (see Notes). While each is fascinating in its own right, collectively these projects span centuries and provide a powerful and instructive lens on data modeling, interinstitutional collaboration, and interoperability. The connections between these projects, both on a scholarly and an institutional level provide a powerful case study in creating distinct but interoperable digital humanities projects and resources. Both Winthrop and Derrida’s Margins are being built in the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, while AOR is a collaboration between Johns Hopkins, University College London, and Princeton. AOR and the Winthrop project share a co-PI, Anthony Grafton, and two books owned and heavily annotated by John Dee are in the Winthrop library and thus came to New England. However, while the AOR project looks at a single renaissance annotator (Gabriel Harvey in Phase I– the project is heavily indebted to the methods and questions outlined in Jardine and Grafton, 1990–, and John Dee in Phase II), the Winthrop project looks at generators of annotators (men and women) making it as much a prosopographical project as a study of annotation. Like AOR, Derrida’s Margins focuses on a single scholar’s interaction with his library, but Jacques Derrida’s annotation practices differ dramatically from Harvey or Dee, and French copyright law poses serious challenges to representing the book pages online. All three projects make use of the International Image Interoperability Framework (http://iiif.io/), but differ on the rest of their underlying data structures. AOR uses a custom XML schema to encode a critical edition of the annotations. Winthrop will use a custom prosopographical-bibliographical relational database, implemented in Django. While most of these relationships will be attested through annotation, the system will also record other connections (including purchasing records, books referenced in letters, etc). The annotation data model will most likely be created using a graph database, given the multiple types of annotations and the ways they can be expressed. Derrida’s Margins will be another custom relational database, built in Django, but will be fully bi-lingual, allowing users to search and browse in English and French. The Winthrop and Derrida database will also be exposed as Linked Open Data. All three projects are committed to interoperability, with a key goal being the ability to search across the three projects once they are complete. The projects are in close contact the IIIF Editors and the W3C Web Annotation Working Group to ensure adherence to and input on best practices and emerging standards.