No abstract

This article draws on the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript represented in the form of a Neo4j graph and the practices of digital prosopography to better understand the circulation of poetry in the sixteenth-century English court. A Neo4j can represent attributes of real-world entities in the form of a graph, which can illuminate patterns in large amounts of information that are difficult to retain otherwise. The paper is motivated by the INKE Modelling and Prototyping team’s objective of improving the analysis of extant and developing digital resources in ways that meaningfully extend the codex form. The authors argue that the manuscript has the same value for scholars interested in its unnamed contributors as for those interested in its named contributors.

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.