2017 IIIF Conference - The Vatican

Books have a rich referential structure whose expression is obscured by their physical medium. Authors repeatedly invoke prior examples and conclusions within a long work, and also refer to passages from other works and other authors, often implicitly. For the first time, IIIF has made a vast corpus of book content and structural data available in an interoperable way, so that we can render the graphical nature of these referential structures visible and tangible to users through annotation. Whereas traditional edition and typesetting developed apparatuses such as indices, biographies, tables of contents, and footnotes to map nonlinear thought onto a static medium, with IIIF we can realise a more fluent interface to the complex thought structures found in books. Our presentation demonstrates 3 novel interactions which use IIIF, Web Annotation, Mirador and the Internet Archive's digital collection to surface the Great Conversation hidden within and between books.