Florilegia: Organizing Scholarly Annotations in PDFs
Annotation techniques that developed over centuries of reading paper documents have persisted with the advent of digital publishing. Highlighting, underlining, marking with symbols, scribbling lines, adding notes in margins, and bookmarking pages all remain common and important practices for interacting with digital documents. Yet while tools for authoring and reading digital documents have proliferated, the way that researchers are able to interact with annotations has not generally improved. Given that annotations are such a crucial part of the scholarly research process, more systems should be available that treat annotations themselves as documents worthy of being described, recalled, and connected in their own right. I will present a system I am currently developing, called Florilegia, which is intended to combine the representational capacities of PDF, RDF, the Web Annotation Data Model, and common annotation practices, towards the hope of re-centering the annotation in the scholarly process.
Patrick Golden is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the history and cultivation of scholarly research infrastructure. Prior to moving to North Carolina, Patrick was a researcher here at the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, where he worked on the project Editorial Practices and the Web.