P. Boot
Annotation is one of the 'scholarly primitives' that John Unsworth discussed in his influential paper on the common methods of humanities scholars. The EDITOR program, under development at the Constantijn Huygens Instituut (in cooperation with NIWI-KNAW) is an annotation tool for scholarly users of electronic editions. It will allow researchers to describe, comment on, categorize and link text fragments of any sort. If the researcher chooses to do so, the annotations can be made accessible to other users of the electronic edition. Communication of research findings on texts can thus be presented from that very text. A choice of display facilities will allow high-level or detailed views of annotation data using text, diagrams and other visualisation aids.
One of the characteristic features of the modern scholarly edition of literary, cultural of historical text is the distinction between a source format (probably XML) and (multiple) presentation formats (probably HTML). Usually, annotation tools annotate web pages. These tools are unsuitable for scholarly use, as web pages are only transitory representations of the scholarly objects that need annotation. EDITOR will, we believe, be unique in that it will allow annotation of the XML source of the edition while showing the annotations in the edition's presentation format.
The conference paper will discuss, at a conceptual level, EDITOR's theoretical background, its requirements, and the architectural decisions that have been made in its development. The program's potential will be shown in an application on an edition of 17th century emblem books at the Emblem Project Utrecht.
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