Lightning Talk
Jonathan Reeve
New York University
Biography
Jonathan Reeve is a web developer, designer, and student of literature. He holds an MA in Literature from Brooklyn College, and is an MA candidate in the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University.
Abstract
This presentation outlines a plan for a social literary annotation engine, an open-source project which would aim to aggregate existing literary criticism in the margins of a text, on a line-by-line or word-by-word basis. This engine would also accept marginalia from website visitors, and would allow visitors to vote for insightful or useful comments in the margins of literary texts, thereby working towards a democratization of literary criticism. Simultaneously, a sophisticated scholarly textual editing platform would be implemented, allowing users to compare extant versions of a given text side-by-side, and to make wiki-style corrections where necessary, thus creating a crowdsourced electronic edition that could potentially allow for greater typographical accuracy than is currently available with static editions.
This presentation will speak to the need for a central literary annotation site such as this, and address developmental methodologies for its creation, such as open-source collaboration. The presentation will also serve as a call for collaborators—for any scholars, developers, financial backers, or organizers who might be interested in the project.