Home
Projects
Derrida’s Margins

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.

View project website

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

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

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

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

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.

Read-Only: A New Phase for Derrida's Margins

13 January 2025

Assistant Director Jeri Wieringa interviews Lead RSE Rebecca Koeser on the decision, and process, of transforming Derrida’s Margins into a “read-only” version.

CDH Project

Visualizing Derrida

21 November 2019

For many digital humanities teams, the only thing better than bringing a successful project to life is seeing its underlying data put to use by other scholars. That's why, when the University of Michigan's Justin Joque tweeted about a visualization using data from Derrida's Margins, the CDH developers who built the project were delighted.

screen_shot_2019-11-21_at_12.22.20_pm.png

Lessons learned from building “Derrida’s Margins”

14 December 2018

Reflection and retrospection, taking time to learn from successes and failures: some lessons learned from building "Derrida's Margins" that we're carrying forward so that we can do better next time.

Designing for Jacques Derrida

30 October 2018

In Derrida’s Margins, design is not an empty vessel. Instead, I’m hoping to bring design into the foreground as an active form of representation. This project approaches design with characteristics of Derrida's own reading practice and that of the philosophy of deconstruction.

Come explore the Personal Library of Jacques Derrida!

11 October 2018

The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton is delighted to announce the launch of "Derrida’s Margins: Inside the Personal Library of Jacques Derrida".