Towards an Architecture for Active Reading

Abstract

Electronic publishing, especially publishing for the Web, is slowly becoming the main avenue for the dissemination of scholarly edited versions of primary texts. While this is a welcome development and increases access to high quality resources for casual users, it also poses new hindrances to deeper engagement with texts published in such a way. This article discusses some of the requirements for such a deeper engagement with texts, both in terms of the needed functionality, which includes commenting, annotating, translating, but also linking and enriching the texts and in terms of the needed overall architecture and the desired modes of communication between readers of such texts.