Annotated Facsimile Editions: Defining macro-level structure for image-based electronic editions

Annotated Facsimile Edition (AFED) is a high-level model for representing macro-level structure in digital facsimiles. AFED models a facsimile as a set of images with multiple orderings or collations. The structure of these collations are encoded by 'annotations' that define a range of images in the collation and describe the properties of the content object identified by the annotations (for example, chapter, paragraph, page, poem). Separate annotation streams encode multiple analytical perspectives, for example, the physical structure of the edition (volumes, pages, and lines) and the poetic structure (poems, titles, epigraphs, and stanzas). Annotations within a single analytical perspective-but not those from different perspectives-follow a hierarchical structure. We discuss our initial results in implementing AFED and using it to deploy a reading interface for AJAX enabled rich-client Web applications. The primary contribution of our work is a general-purpose model for representing digital facsimiles that focuses on the major conceptual structures present among the contents of documents drawn from a wide range of sources. AFED provides a highly flexible model that can serve as a substrate for developing tools designed to support visual document editing during the exploratory stages of scholarly research.