Sayeed Choudhury
Associate Dean for Research Data Management
Johns Hopkins University
Jaap Geraerts
Research Associate, Centre for Editing Lives and Letters
University College London
The Archaeology of Reading (AOR) aims to enable innovative and systematic research of historical reading practices through the creation of a digital research environment that contains two select corpora of books annotated by Gabriel Harvey and John Dee. Through the annotation and physical manipulation of their books, both readers created a web of relationships between annotations and between (constituent parts of) these books. In addition to these compelling humanities dimensions, AOR informs the development of an extensible data infrastructure that supports a range of data and services. At the 2016 Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) spring membership meeting, the AOR team discussed the novel methods by which scholars, librarians and technologists have worked as equal partners to develop this infrastructure. At the 2016 CNI fall membership meeting, the AOR team demonstrated the use of common infrastructure to support multiple data models related to digitized content from manuscripts and early printed books. For this presentation, the AOR team will explain the use of linked data models and protocols to connect the various data and to study the scholars’ and annotators’ pathways through both physical and digital content. Our approach supports the breadth of diverse humanities data without sacrificing the inherent richness from the underlying different data models. This systematic progression of supporting increasingly complex scholarly use cases and of extending the technological capabilities represents an important exemplar for levering extensible, common infrastructure across a diverse range of humanities data.