VICOGLOSSIA: Annotatable and Commentable Library as a Bridge between Reader and Scholar (a proof of concept study: Early Soviet Philological Culture)

Abstract

How can we study, present and teach complex cultural phenomena such as the Russian philological culture of the 1920s? To achieve this goal, we elaborated a knowledge representation that facilitates scientific collaboration, enables distant reading, improves the navigation of scholarly literature, links classical texts to rich international scholarship, and provides a basis of effective visualization. Digital Humanities offer an ideal framework for the intense human-computer collaboration required to carry out such a project. We focus on the network of relations both within and between three key communities of the early Soviet philological milieu – the Formalists, the Marrists and the Bakhtinists – approaching them through the optics of two major philological romans à clef of the period. To this end, we (1) prepared a collection of primary texts; (2) built a repository of secondary literature; (3) using this research literature, enriched primary texts with both general and ad locum annotations; (4) adapted the nano-publications method as a comprehensive approach for representing this scholarly knowledge in the Semantic Web. We make use of the quantitative methods toolkit of the VicoGlossia system, which was developed as part of an international and inter-institutional collaboration.

Keywords

• Digital library
• collaborative knowledge
• semi-automatical annotation
• translation alignment
• critical digital editing