Annotating digital texts in the Brown University Library

Andrew AshtonBrown University Library

Textual scholarship at Brown

• Brown University Women Writers Project

• Virtual Humanities Lab• Center of Digital Epigraphy• Modernist Journals Project• Hypertext, CAVE Writing, etc.

The Pico Project

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s 900 Theses (1486)

AtomPub

• AtomPub is an engine for creating, publishing, and updating annotations via HTTP.

• XML-based format for sending, receiving data on the web.

• Includes annotation body, metadata, links to target resource.

• RDF to express relationships between collections, digital objects, and annotations.

A place to gather, index, store, preserve, and make available digital assets produced via the scholarly, instructional, research, and administrative activities at Brown.

• Based on Fedora Commons• Rights management via Shibboleth• APIs and web services for campus

developers• User interface to upload, catalog, and

arrange personal materials stored in the BDR

AABB

CC

PrimaryObject PrimaryObject

Repository

Annotation services

My group’s annotations

Annotation

Annotation

Annotation

Annotation

About component “C”

Annotation

Annotation

Annotation

Annotation

Annotation

Annotation

Annotation

Annotation

Annotation

Annotation

My annotations

Annotation

Annotation

A scholar annotates a digital object. The annotation is packaged in an AtomPub document and sent to the digital repository via HTTP.

Atom + XMLThe repository ingests the annotation as a new object, complete with its own metadata. RDF defines it as an annotation of another object.

RD

F/L

inked

Data

Syndication/CollaborationAggregation/publication

Annotations are syndicated as Atom feeds, similar to those created from blogs. Scholars can subscribe to feeds based on their research interests and participation in collaborative groups.

Groups of annotations (e.g., translations, editorial comments) are aggregated into new standalone documents and published with attribution.

Annotations are published as a Linked Data source using RDF, complete with ontological classification and links to the digital objects that they address.

All permutations of annotations, digital objects, and their derivatives are addressable as stable entities via a HTTP URI. Additionally, they are all subject to annotation, thereby blurring the traditional distinction between “primary objects” and “annotations.”

Annotation services

Targeting portions of documents

• TEI offers structural anchors (<p>, <div>, etc.)

• XPointer offers one mechanism for addressing structural anchors via Xpath:Example:

http://www.brown.edu/texts/Bradstreet.xml#xpointer(‘/TEI/teiHeader’)

• XPointer is insufficient as a sole solution for addressing fragments of TEI texts.

Constraints• OAC convention for addressing parts

of an annotation target.• Provides a model for addressing

fragments of documents not readily addressed via a URI fragment identifier:

RDF “Aspect slicing”

• Creating RDF out of fragments of TEI (and other objects).

• Addressable, URIs including semantic information and links back to source documents.

• Enables annotation of semantic data within and across documents, rather than simply fragments or passages.

TEI RDF

TEI semantic data as a web resources

RDF Constraints with TEI

Note about a person

FOAF

TEI

Content

oac:Constrained

Target

Database

Video

oac:Constraint

oac:Constrained

By

sameAs

Thank you

Andrew AshtonBrown University library

Andrew_Ashton@brown.eduTwitter: @andyashton

http://library.brown.edu/cds