Derrida’s Margins
Built by CDH
An online research tool for the philosopher’s annotations that provides a behind-the-scenes look at his reading practices and the philosophy of deconstruction.
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Code
Code
Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Benjamin Hicks, Kevin Glover, Kevin McElwee, Nick Budak, Xinyi Li, and Jean Bauer, “derrida-django v1.3” (Zenodo, October 25, 2021)
Data
Data
Katie Chenoweth, Rebecca Koeser, Renée Altergott, Alexander Baron-Raiffe, Jean Bauer, Nicholas Budak, Chad Cordova, Austin Hancock, Benjamin Hicks, Kevin McElwee, and Chloé Vettier, “Derrida’s Margins Datasets” (Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, October 29, 2021).
Katie Chenoweth, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, and Baron-Raiffe Alexander, “Derrida’s Margins Web Archive” (Princeton University, 2024).
Documentation
Documentation
Katie Chenoweth, Alexander Baron-Raiffe, Jean Bauer, and Natalia Ermolaev, “CDH Project Charter – Derrida’s Margins 2016-17” (Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, June 20, 2016).
Publications and Presentations
Publications and Presentations
Jean Bauer, Rebecca Munson, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Xinyi Li, and Benjamin Hicks, “Pages and Margins” (Panel “Archaeologies of Reading: Modeling and Recreating the Annotation Practices of Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, Jacques Derrida, and the Winthrop Family,” Digital Humanities 2017, Montreal, Quebec, August 2017)
Katie Chenoweth, “Derrida’s Margins” (Panel “Archaeologies of Reading: Modeling and Recreating the Annotation Practices of Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, Jacques Derrida, and the Winthrop Family,” Digital Humanities 2017, Montreal, Quebec, August 2017).
Rebecca Sutton Koeser, “Derrida’s Margins: Technical Overview, Development Processes, and Lessons Learned” (Research Programmers and Software Engineers meeting., Princeton, NJ, October 8, 2018).
Awards
Awards
Public Awards for UI Design, UX Design, and Innovation, CSS Design Awards, 2020.
“Derrida’s Margins” is a website and online research tool for annotations from the Library of Jacques Derrida, housed at Princeton University Library. Jacques Derrida is one of the major figures of twentieth-century thought, and his library--which bears the traces of decades of close reading--represents a major intellectual archive. The first phase focused on annotations related to Derrida’s landmark 1967 work De la grammatologie ( Of Grammatology ). It was in Of Grammatology that Derrida first articulated a new style of critical reading, which would become the foundation of the philosophy of “deconstruction.”
Our online research tool enables scholars to study the development of this philosophy in an unprecedented way by providing comprehensive digital access to the annotations, marginalia, bookmarks, tipped-in pages, and notes from Derrida’s library that correspond to the roughly one thousand citations found in the pages Of Grammatology. We began by identifying all quotations and references in Of Grammatology; we then located these references in Derrida’s personal copies of each work, transcribing all relevant marginal annotations and other markings. Digital images and transcriptions of these annotated pages form the basis of the website, allowing users to track and search Derrida’s reading practices. This corpus will serve as a pilot data set for future work with an expanded corpus, allowing us to establish protocols, workflow, and a relational database model.
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CDH Project
News and Media
Derrida’s Library: Deconstruction and the Book
In this course taught by Katie Chenoweth, students learned about the philosopher Jacques Derrida through his working library.
Team
Project Director
Technical Lead
Project Manager
Project Coordinator
User Experience Designer
Web Developer
Database Designer
Advisor
Geoffrey Bennington
Eduardo Cadava
Avital Ronell
Graduate Research Assistant
Renee Altergott
Chad Cordova
Austin Hancock
Chloe Vettier
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Jin Chow
Elise Freeman
Madeleine Marr
Jianing Zhao
Grants
2016–2017
Sponsored Project