Mesotext. Digitised Emblems, Modelled Annotations and Humanities Scholarship

Abstract

Mesotext is a contribution to the debate about the use of digital texts in the humanities. It discusses the creation of digital editions and the ways digital editions can be made productive in humanities scholarship. The special case it considers is that of research into the emblem, the sixteenth and seventeenth century literary genre that joins an image, a motto and an often moralizing epigram. Libraries and scholars have created a number of online emblem editions, and the book provides a model for discussing these editions. The book argues that online editions can and must be more than static repositories of pre-processed information. Online editions should evolve into scholarly working environments. The most strikingly missing piece of functionality in this respect is that of annotation. Digital editions should offer a facility where researchers can store unstructured remarks and structured observations with respect to the available texts. The body of the book discusses a number of approaches to annotation systems that have been investigated in the context of digital emblem books. The book argues annotation systems should facilitate structured annotation anchored to precise locations in the annotated texts. If these conditions are fulfilled, annotation can become mesotext, text positioned between the annotated texts and the scholarly articles and monographs for which the annotations provide the evidence.