Sayeed Choudhury
Associate Dean for Research Data Management
Johns Hopkins University
Jaap Geraerts
Research Associate, Centre for Editing Lives and Letters
University College London
Whereas previous scholarship often used marginal annotations to probe into the mind of a specific reader, more recently scholars have become interested in the history of reading, a sub-discipline that focuses on the actual practice of reading. As a result, projects such as the Archaeology of Reading need to enable scholars to study all the interventions readers made in their books. The first part of this presentation will explain the way in which these scholarly asks have informed the way readers’ interventions are captured. Moreover, it will discuss the process of developing a bespoke transcription protocol, which involved close cooperation between scholars and technical experts. The second part of this presentation will describe the manner through which the scholars and technologists worked closely together throughout the infrastructure development. In addition to the results of this deep engagement, we will describe the process by which we developed use cases, used GitHub to develop and share the transcription protocol and augmented an existing infrastructure to support digital manuscripts. This underlying infrastructure represents a framework including linked data, application program interfaces (APIs) and endpoints that facilitates use of data by third parties and integration with International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) compliant viewers such as Mirador and Universal Viewer.