(re)connecting

[Rebecca Sutton Koeser <re...@princeton.edu>]

Hello, all!  And happy new year!

How is the incubation going?

I'm (re)connecting with the group after expressing initial interest and 
then never joining the new listserv due to a change in positions.  I 
wasn't sure if I would have any time to be involved with the annotation 
work or it would make sense with my new job.  But, as it turns out, I'm 
now working on two different scholarly projects which are working with 
annotation:

https://cdh.princeton.edu/projects/TheWinthropFamilyonthePage/

https://cdh.princeton.edu/projects/Derrida%E2%80%99sMargins/

These projects are working to model, document, and investigate 
historical annotations and marginalia in existing rare book volumes, 
rather than creating new annotations, but I think that work is still 
something that can be done within the realm of the annotator project.  
(And if it is an effective approach, there is considerable potential for 
reusing it with other materials and projects.)

I've been considering re-using some of the annotation work I did on the 
Readux project I worked on while I was at Emory University (project 
site: https://readux.library.emory.edu/; codebase: 
https://github.com/emory-libraries/readux).  Specifically, I was 
thinking of generalizing the annotator store I built into Readux to make 
it a reusable django application, and re-using some of the annotator 2.x 
plugins we developed for Readux (see the list here: 
https://github.com/emory-lits-labs?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=annotator&type=&language= 
).

My main question at this point: is it a bad idea to continue working 
with the annotator.js 2.x code and plugins?  It would be helpful if 
someone could someone clarify the relationship between the new apache 
annotator and the existing annotator.js codebase. (I've looked over the 
emails on the listserv archives, but still don't have a good sense of 
this.)   If the new apache annotator project results in a different 
approach or completely new codebase, would there be some way to 
eventually migrate from the annotator.js stack to the new 
implementation?  For what it's worth, if we do go down this road of 
re-using the Readux code and annotator plugins, I think it's reasonable 
to expect that I would have some time to contribute to the main 
annotator codebase as well.

Look forward to hearing what you think.

Rebecca

Re: (re)connecting

[Rebecca Sutton Koeser <re...@princeton.edu>]

Hello, Benjamin – thanks for your response!  I was a little concerned when I didn’t hear anything at all, so -- glad to hear something, even if it took a while.

Your plan to make the new annotator “thing” (code? tool?) more minimal (and hopefully thus easier to use with a variety of tools) makes a lot of sense, and I can see that Annotator.js 2.x has a fair bit of baggage that you might not want to carry along.

I find it very reassuring that one goal is to make annotation data from Annotator.js is compatible with the new thing (even if that requires transformation or import).  That makes me feel much more comfortable with using the existing annotator.js 2.x code and Readux plugins in the short term, which I know will provide the functionality I want, even though annotator.js 2.x feels like sort of a dead end in some ways.

For what it’s worth, I’ll likely also be looking into making my new annotation compatible with IIIF Presentation and Annotation, which is currently based on Open Annotation but will be shifting to the new W3C Web Annotation model in the next version (although I understand Open Annotation and Web Annotation are very similar). 

I’m looking forward to hearing more about the goals and the way forward for the new annotator project, and once it gets a bit further along I expect I will have some use cases and test data to work with for trying it out and thinking about migrations. :-)

Thanks,
Rebecca
 

Re: (re)connecting

[Benjamin Young <by...@bigbluehat.com>]

Hey Rebecca!


First, apologies for the super slow reply!


Second, determining what to do with ye olde Annotator.js stuff is part of what we (as a group) need to discuss and decide.


FWIW, Randall and I (the two most active here at present) are leaning toward starting fresh using his dom-anchor libraries: https://github.com/tilgovi?utf8=%E2%9C%93&tab=repositories&q=dom-anchor&type=&language=


The goal would still be to make the annotation *data* output from Annotator.js consumable by this new thing, but it's unlikely the plugin architecture (or similar) would work the same.


Our hope is to keep this new thing as minimal as possible, and allow it to serve more purposes via other frameworks and systems--trying to avoid building yet-another-JS-framework-thing. :)


Additionally, the copyright of the old code is owned by multiple people, and the plugin ecosystem is also very mixed. However, it looks like the Readux addons are fabulously Apache License 2.0 licensed. ^_^


We don't want to leave the Annotator.js-based projects behind--quiet the opposite--but we do need to have a solid foundation to build from...and it's not clear that Annotator.js 2.0 is that.


Happy to hear your thoughts regardless! :)


Thanks for being here!

Benjamin


--

http://bigbluehat.com/

http://linkedin.com/in/benjaminyoung

________________________________
From: Rebecca Sutton Koeser <re...@princeton.edu>
Sent: Thursday, January 5, 2017 10:26:22 AM
To: dev@annotator.incubator.apache.org
Subject: (re)connecting

Hello, all!  And happy new year!

How is the incubation going?

I'm (re)connecting with the group after expressing initial interest and
then never joining the new listserv due to a change in positions.  I
wasn't sure if I would have any time to be involved with the annotation
work or it would make sense with my new job.  But, as it turns out, I'm
now working on two different scholarly projects which are working with
annotation:

https://cdh.princeton.edu/projects/TheWinthropFamilyonthePage/

https://cdh.princeton.edu/projects/Derrida%E2%80%99sMargins/

These projects are working to model, document, and investigate
historical annotations and marginalia in existing rare book volumes,
rather than creating new annotations, but I think that work is still
something that can be done within the realm of the annotator project.
(And if it is an effective approach, there is considerable potential for
reusing it with other materials and projects.)

I've been considering re-using some of the annotation work I did on the
Readux project I worked on while I was at Emory University (project
site: https://readux.library.emory.edu/; codebase:
https://github.com/emory-libraries/readux).  Specifically, I was
thinking of generalizing the annotator store I built into Readux to make
it a reusable django application, and re-using some of the annotator 2.x
plugins we developed for Readux (see the list here:
https://github.com/emory-lits-labs?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=annotator&type=&language=
).

My main question at this point: is it a bad idea to continue working
with the annotator.js 2.x code and plugins?  It would be helpful if
someone could someone clarify the relationship between the new apache
annotator and the existing annotator.js codebase. (I've looked over the
emails on the listserv archives, but still don't have a good sense of
this.)   If the new apache annotator project results in a different
approach or completely new codebase, would there be some way to
eventually migrate from the annotator.js stack to the new
implementation?  For what it's worth, if we do go down this road of
re-using the Readux code and annotator plugins, I think it's reasonable
to expect that I would have some time to contribute to the main
annotator codebase as well.

Look forward to hearing what you think.

Rebecca