Neel Smith of Holy Cross is talking about the Homer Multitext project, a “long term project to represent the transmission of the Iliad in digital form.”

He shows the oldest extant ms of the Iliad, which includes 10th century notes. “The medieval scribes create a wonderful hypermedia” work.

“Scholarly annotation starts with citation.” He says we have a good standard: URNs, which can point to, for example, and ISBN number. His project uses URNs to refer to texts in a FRBR-like hierarchy [works at various levels of abstraction]. These are semantically rich and machine-actionable. You can google URN and get the object. You can put a URN into a URL for direct Web access. You can embed an image into a Web page via its URN [using a service, I believe].

An annotation is an association. In a scholarly notation, it’s associated with a citable entity. [He shows some great examples of the possibilities of cross linking and associating.]

The metadata is expressed as RDF triples. Within the Homer project, they’re inductively building up a schema of the complete graph [network of connections]. For end users, this means you can see everything associated with a particular URN. Building a facsimile browser, for example, becomes straightforward, mainly requiring the application of XSL and CSS to style it.

Another example: Mise en page: automated layout analysis. This in-progress project analyzes the layout of annotation info on the Homeric pages.

Categories: interop, libraries, liveblog, too big to know dw