Playing Well With Others: The Social Edition and Computational Collaboration

Abstract

This article draws on the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript’s RDFa encoding practice as a case study of how to formalize statements about entities on the Web in a way that is machine-parsable. RDFa encoding allows machines to become collaborators with human readers in the discovery of new connections between entities (people, places, and events) even between websites. The edition’s encoding is motivated by the INKE Modelling and Prototyping team’s guiding research question about the implications and impact of real-time applications in relation to traditionally static knowledge objects. The authors argue for the value of bringing texts into communication with other texts, through RDFa, allowing virtual collaboration even when the scholars behind the projects do not know one another.