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In the last few years, Saint Louis University has generated some great tools and projects for research. At the least, I am willing to share T-PEN our tool for transcription of digital images and discuss/demo the Tradamus tool that is forthcoming (April 2014) that seeks to be a modular, but end-to-end solution for creating a digital edition.

Probably, I will also talk about vHMML, which is an online resource for learning coming out in Spring, and a few other projects I can’t commit to text, but cannot keep secret.

In a perfect conference, these demos will only serve to show what chasms are left in tool development as I seek to find the next great need and expand these tools into other fields.

Every project I have worked on has been in collaboration with at least two other institutions and began with a sturdy “This would be cool, if it were not impossible” conversation. I want to finish another one of those conversations, but I would be happy to start one.

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The Open Annotation Collaboration published a data model in February that should be recognized as disruptive. JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data whose 1.0 specifications landed November 5th (Tuesday) is another in a cluster of W3C standards that show digital objects are beginning to exist as real things that try to completely represent tangible artifacts and not simply a new whizbang-computery way to offer a limp reference to something real.

Markup, I insist, was the necessary jolt to encourage machine readable encoding. XML is a convenient vehicle to bridge relational tools and linked open data(LOD) (or any triple), but the weight limit of RDF-XML has been exceeded. The standards for annotation are necessary for interoperability and the exposure/discovery of LOD, but is also a very useful way to work with offline, local, or private/siloed data.

I am able to share experience with OAC and the manuscript-focused children of OAC, SharedCanvas and IIIF. These standards were emerging as the transcription tool T-PEN was being completed – it has allowed us to include features that were previously unplanned and filled me with healthy discontent at its completeness. Our current project, a tool for the complete creation of digital editions (focusing on manuscripts) makes heavy use of these standards and is dangerously near spawning a few of its own.

I would like to learn about other efforts in annotation, especially in fields outside of manuscripts. What already exists, what is in flux, and has this shift impacted the way you organize data?

At the very least, I would like to debate whether annotation is a fad or there is a real possibility that markup will get out of the way and we may be left with a single pristine artifact that takes the universe as its metadata.