Marginalia in the Early Modern & Post-Modern Atlantic Worlds

9:00-9:15 am: Greetings and Introductions. Tony Grafton, Earle Havens, Jean Bauer

9:15-10:15: “Archaeologies of Reading: Expanding the AOR Digital Corpus.” This session will discuss the evolution of AOR over the past several years from heavy digital infrastructural development, to further applications and broadening humanities content for wider user audiences. Earle Havens, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University; Matthew Symonds, Jaap Geraerts, Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London

10:45-12:15 pm: Panel discussions, Princeton Center for Digital Humanities, Winthrop, and Derrida teams.

10:45-11:15: “Constraints of the Archive”: This session will discuss the obstacles—material, legal, and intellectual—of working to digitize archives. Speakers will reflect on problems we came across (copyright issues, physical conditions for digitization) and their effects on the intellectual goals of the projects. Alexander Baron-Raiffe, Madeline McMahon, and Jean Bauer

11:15-11:45: “Documents to Data”: This session will reflect on the intellectual distinction between viewing texts as documents (as humanities scholars traditionally do) and seeing them as data (to facilitate digitally enhanced analysis). Speakers will reflect on questions like: what constitutes a moment of citation? What counts as an “annotation” (especially verbal vs. nonverbal vs. insertions)? What constitutes “raw” material, or, to what extent data is always already interpreted? Christian Flow, Katie Chenoweth, Alexander Baron-Raiffe, and Rebecca Munson

11:45-12:15 pm: “Thinking Relationally”: This session will explore the different ways of structuring relational databases and the very different routes that our projects took thanks, largely, to how they conceptualize the relationships among books, annotations, and people. Panelists will discuss the intellectual questions that shaped their data schemas and how they affect the user’s experience of the site. Tony Grafton, Katie Chenoweth, Jean Bauer

Organized by Anthony Grafton and Jean Bauer (Princeton) and Earle Havens (Johns Hopkins University)