Stephen Nichols
Professor Emeritus German and Romance Languages
Johns Hopkins University
Tamsyn Rose-Steel
CLIR/Mellon Fellow in Medieval Data Curatio
Johns Hopkins University
Sayeed Choudhury
Associate Dean for Research Data Management
Johns Hopkins University
The subject of digital annotations is an area of increasing interest and technological investment. For example, the W3C working group on Web annotation are chartered to develop specifications for an “interoperable, sharable, distributed Web annotation architecture” and have recently launched its data model and use cases; while Johns Hopkins University (JHU), in partnership with Princeton University and University College London, has received a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to study annotated early modern books: the ‘Archaeology of Reading’ project will involve the transcription of thousands of handwritten marginalia into a digital format that can be mined and analyzed systematically in an electronic environment. In this presentation we will discuss the use cases we are developing for viewing and annotating manuscripts in a SharedCanvas viewer such as Mirador 2. SharedCanvas is a data model that “specifies a linked data based approach for describing digital facsimiles of physical objects in a collaborative fashion,” and has been developed within the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to be of particular use to items of cultural heritage, such as medieval manuscripts. Our team, consisting of software developers and scholars, will show the potential of annotated images and discuss how we propose to build on this to create a hub for scholarship. We will present as a case study the sites curated by JHU: the Archaeology of Reading and the Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts, which is home to the Roman de la Rose Digital Library, Christine de Pizan Digital Scriptorium and Bible Historiale Manuscript Portal. Two in-depth scholarly use case scenarios will examine how linked annotations can be used to explore changes in rubrication in Rose manuscripts, and to understand networks of citation in medieval literature.