DH-CASE 2013 - Collaborative Annotations in Shared Environments: Metadata, Vocabularies and Techniques in the Digital Humanities

In these last few years, collections of digital text have strongly increased in number, especially in the field of humanities. Digital libraries of full-text documents, including digital editions of literary texts, are emerging as environments for the production, the management and the dissemination of complex annotated corpora. The potential interpretative levels emerging from the analysis of textual phenomena (including bibliographic, linguistic, thematic, structural, rhetorical and prosopographic aspects) converge to produce a stratification of annotations whose complex interactions may give light to new and unexpected potentials for analysis. Yet, each community in the field of humanities (archives, libraries, museums, literary studies, etc.) have developed independent metadata models and annotation techniques for their corpora. In a shared environment, the possibility to annotate different aspects of a text overlaps with metadata models and ontologies used for annotation and related values vocabularies but also with techniques for producing annotations, both with embedded or stand-off markup methods based on XML or other formal languages possibly even in a linked data perspective. The aim of this proceeding is to explore the state of art in the field of collaboration in text annotation and to reflect on existing platforms for document sharing and management, methods and techniques for multi-level annotation, metadata and vocabularies for declaring interpretative instances.