User:SStoyanova

From Open Annotation Collaboration

Silvia Stoyanova

Project Director and Lecturer

Department of French and Italian at Princeton University

Use Case: Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone: a hypertext template for scholarly annotation

I am proposing as case study a project I have been developing since October 2010 together with Ben Johnston, director of the Humanities Resource Center at Princeton University. The project explores digital annotation and visualization tools to build a hypertext navigation template for a content rich, copiously annotated 19th century Italian manuscript, entitled the Zibaldone (a miscellany of thoughts), which functioned as the intellectual laboratory of Giacomo Leopardi – a major scholar and poet of the modern age. I suggest that this case study could serve the objectives of OAC first as a paradigm of using digital scholarly annotation and semantic tagging for the interpretation and organization of large amounts of textual data, and therefore as a model for writing digital criticism, and second as example of web-based critical apparatus for works with large bibliographical material.

The Zibaldone is a magnified version of a researcher’s note-taking archives – the record of 15 years of critical engagement with the Western cultural tradition and contemporaneous scholarly and fictional texts; it is composed of textual fragments of various length and structural complexity, amounting to about one million words in the space of 4526 manuscript pages. Beyond the typical for scholarly texts references to external sources and footnotes, the manuscript is interspersed with marginal, interlinear and parenthetical comments, several thousand internal references ranging in semantic relevance, and an external index composed in view of its further organization into treatises. Extraordinary for a pre-digital text are the deployment of annotation in the form of virtual hyperlinks connecting the fragments and the comprehensive semantic tagging at the paragraph level in the index. Prompted by the limitations of the scripted page to render the composite texture of relativist critical discourse, generated from many sources and operating at multiple levels of argumentation, the Zibaldone is a prototype of digital scholarship which demands more than footnotes and endnotes – it charts the coordinate system of hyperspace.

The Zibaldone’s structural features offer a wide field for experimentation to respond to the modeling shortcomings of current annotation applications, which Hunter, Cole, Sanderson and Van de Sompel note in their report on OAC (Digital Humanities 2010, Kings College, London, July 7 - 10 2010), such as its extended chain references, where annotations are target of further annotations; the cross-listings of its index shows that a single fragment usually has multiple annotations, while a thematic tag may apply to multiple targets; finally, the text is a paradigm of the fragment-system dialectic, where few fragments are strictly subordinate to others, while most could be inscribed into multiple potential narratives of various length. Indeed, a main challenge for the critical reader of this text is to follow the potential narrative pathways charted by its annotations in its print form. The digital navigational template will respond to this challenge and will provide the ability to save, export and visualize chronologically and thematically author- and custom-generated pathways. It will enable the researcher to work with versions of the text rearranged according to the disposition of the internal references or the various semantic filters provided by the index tags. The superimposition of these filters will fill out the textured picture of what otherwise remains a sketch of suggestive fragments. Additionally, the external references will be hyperlinked to their original context retrieved from web-based resources or provided as pdf files. Finally, the text will be annotated with its current critical bibliography and scholars will be encouraged to tag and add their publications to its site. Because of the fragmentary and dialectical nature of the text, criticism on the Zibaldone frequently faces the dilemma of reproducing large sections of the original or extrapolating arguments out of context. The project of transferring the Zibaldone in XML and activating its hyperlinks will allow scholars who engage in digital criticism to solve this dilemma by embedding links to specific passages of the document, while giving the reader the opportunity to become more active and follow more promptly potential associations beyond those indicated. The project’s implementation of digital annotation and visualization tools will be of interest to humanities scholars working on the semantic tagging and organization of their own research material and on the theory and practice of digital criticism. More specifically, the project’s results would serve scholars researching the phenomenology of fragmentary writing and the genre of the intellectual diary (which in the digital age has frequently taken on the form of the blog), as well as the technological means available for their formal representation and structural organization. While the project is at the experimental stage, we expect to make significant progress during the course of this spring semester and complete it by Fall 2012. Alongside transferring more sections of the manuscript into XML and adding the data from the index, several text mining, visualization and annotation applications will be probed, such as the Nepomuk social semantic annotation applications, Prezi, Pliny, GraphViz, VKB, among others. The project has been proposed for a start-up grant from the NEH-digital humanities with a time frame September 1, 2011 – May 31, 2012. Its working site, which includes about 15% of the text encoded in XML and has a few of its navigational features running, can be accessed at: http://etc.princeton.edu/zibaldone.