An article by Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker on literary annotation and its new possibilities in the Digital Humanities (including the origins of the research project that led up to TEASys) was published in the ongoing MLA anthology Literary Studies in the Digital Age. Under the title “Whipping Boys Explained: Literary Annotation and Digital Humanities” they argue that “a digital space for text and annotations and the practices it entails create the need to establish certain methodologies, which will in turn require some conceptual clarification as to why a text should be annotated—in other words, a theory of annotation. Practice leads to methodology and theory, and theory leads back to practice.” This threefold approach of methodology, theory and practice led to the development of a “tagging” system to classify knowledge gained from and applied to literary texts – in other words: a taxonomy for the formation of knowledge from literary texts.
The system is demonstrated with an example drawn from Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper: the whipping boy.
The article is open access and can be read at MLA Commons Website.
