Interventions in Jacques Derrida's library

Abstract

Overview Derrida’s Margins is a website and online research tool for annotations from the Library of Jacques Derrida, housed at Princeton University Library (PUL). 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 of the project focused on annotations related to Derrida’s landmark 1967 work De la grammatologie ( Of Grammatology ). Data collection methods Works cited by Derrida in De la grammatologie were documented in a private Zotero library using a custom tagging system to indicate the location and kind of references in a particular work. That data was imported by script into a custom database, creating records for books, sections of books, and journal articles. Records were also created for references in De la grammatologie based on information encoded in the Zotero tags. The book and reference data was further cleaned and refined in the database after import; items with digital editions available from PUL were linked via IIIF. Interventions were documented by project researchers using a custom-built annotation solution, linked to digitized page images from PUL digital editions for this collection. The current phase of the project only includes structured data for annotation interventions and not insertions. Data dictionary URIs are used as unique identifiers for references, books, and annotations across all datasets, to allow linking the information. URIs will resolve to the best available representation of that content on the Derrida’s Margins website (in some cases, this is a search result). Intervention data fields id : unique URI for each intervention book id : unique URI for the item where the intervention occurs book title : display title for the item where the intervention occurs page : label for the page in the book where the intervention occurs tags : list of tags describing the intervention. Tags currently include:underliningcirclingarrowbracket(s)linecorrectionmarginal markpunctuation markflyleaf notetext illegibletranscription uncertainblue inkblack inkred inkpencil text content : content of the annotation, for verbal annotations text language : language of the annotation, for verbal annotations text language code : ISO language code for the language of the annotation quote content : a transcription of the annotated passage quote language : the language of the annotated passage quote language code : ISO language code for the annotated passage annotator : authorized name of the annotator, if known