User:SBrown

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CWRC Annotation Use Case v1 (March 2011)

Susan Brown, Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory

These are scenarios regarding annotation for the CWRC project. The CWRC project aims to lower the bar for scholars’ participation in the use, creation and sharing of high-quality electronic resources for literary study. The project’s scope and aims are outlined on the website at [1].

To facilitate the participation of humanists with little or no training in digital humanities methods, CWRC needs a web-based set of tools that allow scholars to work in a reassuringly familiar and usable environment but that will encourage them to increase the value of their digital texts by adding markup and metadata that is standards-based and interoperable.

Just as browsers now blur the division between consumption and production on the web by incorporating spell-checking features, we would like to create an environment in which contribution to the enhancement of digital collections can happen almost seamlessly as part of the scholarly research process. The reading environment and the annotating environment should be as close as possible to one another.

The CWRC repository, ORCA, will hold a wide range of object types related to a number of disparate projects. The challenge is how to create an architecture and develop metadata that allow for maximum interoperability of materials and their use by a wide range of tools without putting too much burden on scholars who are not digital humanists and may be using the repository only occasionally.

Key considerations for CWRC annotations:

  • They will apply to a wide range of object types: html texts, pdfs, TEI texts, XML texts, audio, video, and images
  • They will OVERLAP
  • Because they will overlap, we are interested in making them STANDOFF
  • We want a high level of INTEROPERABILITY between objects and to maintain robust AUTHORITY LISTS with minimal management; i.e. we want to set things up so that users help maintain the authority lists.
  • We want to annotate both materials within the CWRC collection and REMOTE RESOURCES
  • We want members of CWRC to be able to maintain PERSONAL RESEARCH COLLECTIONS including their “own” annotations that they may not wish to make public
  • CWRC texts will be very UNSTABLE: some of the texts will be very much in progress so we need to deal with what happens when the annotated text changes, moves, or is deleted
  • This means that we need to consider the possibility of VERSIONING ANNOTATION
  • We want to ensure that PROVENANCE and ATTRIBUTION of annotations are possible; we want to be able to track the WORKFLOW implications of e.g. who has annotated.
  • NETCHAINING
  • interacting with authority lists/controlled vocabularies and significant bodies of prosopographic information
  • support creation of "personal" research collections composed of annotations, local repository materials, web-based materials, non-digital materials e.g. books that they have in their collections.
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