The Linked Editing Academic Framework (LEAF) in the Multimodal Annotation Ecosystem

Diane Jakacki, Bucknell University (USA)
Susan Brown, University of Guelph (Canada)
Michael Ilovan, University of Alberta (Canada)
Luciano Frizzera, Concordia University (Canada)

The Linked Editing Academic Framework (LEAF) is a virtual research environment, a platform and suite of tools designed to support researchers working collaboratively in cultural heritage spaces, enabling them to undertake sophisticated editorial work in multiple media formats. Built with the Islandora repository framework, LEAF is based on linked data principles and interlinked with the larger LOD ecosystem, not only through its use of PIDs (Persistent Identifiers) but through a sophisticated toolset that allows novice as well as expert users to annotate cultural heritage materials at both meta- and granular-levels. The platform allows scholars to focus on their subject of study rather than to learn how to code, enabling researchers without extensive technical expertise to annotate content as part of their scholarly workflows. LEAF mobilizes some tools by directly integrating them into the platform; others are supported indirectly by either providing compatible outputs or supporting/retooling their outputs; and some core components are also modular so they can serve as stand-alone tools or be integrated in other systems.

Diane K. Jakacki is Digital Scholarship Coordinator and Associated Faculty in Comparative & Digital Humanities at Bucknell University (US). She is lead investigator on the Mellon Foundation-funded Liberal Arts Based Digital Editions Publishing Cooperative and a co-lead of the Linked Editing Academic Framework (LEAF); she participates in LINCS in that capacity, as well as a researcher on early modern London. Her research focuses on digital humanities scholarship and pedagogy, early modern British literature and drama, critical making, digital scholarly production and publication. In 2022-23 she was a Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities, modeling historical events encoded in TEI for development as Linked Open Data.

Susan Brown is Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship and Professor of English at the University of Guelph. She engages from an intersectional feminist perspective with the use of semantic technologies for cultural scholarship through the Orlando Project in women’s literary history. Her critical infrastructure work explores how online systems for creating, enhancing, and sharing cultural knowledge can advance collaborative knowledge production, diversity and inclusivity, respectful data creation and dissemination, sustainable access to cultural scholarship, and research data management and preservation. She directs the multi-institutional Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) and the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS). She founded with colleagues at Guelph an interdisciplinary major in Culture and Technology Studies and The Humanities Interdisciplinary Collaboration (THINC) Lab. She is the past-President (2022-23) of the governing board of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities (2013-2019).