Annotating digital libraries and electronic editions in a collaborative and semantic perspective

The distinction between digital libraries and electronic editions is becom-ing more and more subtle. The practice of annotation represents a point of conver-gence of two only apparently separated worlds. The aim of this paper is to present a model of collaborative semantic annotation of texts (SemLib project), suggesting a system that find in Semantic Web and Linked Data the solution technologies for en-abling structured semantic annotation, also in the field of electronic editions in Digi-tal Humanities domain. The main purpose of SemLib is to develop an application so to make easy for developers the integration of annotation software in digital librar-ies, which are different both for technical implementations and managed contents, and provide to users, indifferently from their cultural backgrounds, a simple system which could be used as a front-end. We present, for this purpose, a final example of semantic annotation in a specific context: a digital edition of a literary text and the issues that an annotation task involves

Semantically Rich Tools for Text Exploration

Literary scholarship is poised to benefit immensely from the emerging modular software frameworks that support deep and finely grained investigations of digital texts. Humanities research centers, such as the Brown University Women Writers Project, have invested substantially in enriching bodies of literary texts with semantic and structural information, using XML formats such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Recent innovations in scholarly software design offer opportunities to exploit the semantic depth of TEI collections by creating new tools for textual analysis and collaboration. To this end, the Brown University Scholarly Technology Group (STG) and the Brown University Women Writers Project (WWP) propose a new effort to create a prototype suite of software tools to explore TEI encoded texts in the new Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR)