Annotating Upstream: Digital Scholars, Art History, and the Interoperable Image

Written primarily from the position of an art historian engaged in digital research and data-intensive projects, this essay explores annotations on interoperable images and the possibility for annotations as “thick data.” Images and descriptive metadata can be used and re-used in any number of contexts, but annotations are contextual fragments of scholarly insights that do not translate easily across domains. While data models for web annotation are clearly defined in a technical sense, their implementation is socially motivated. This essay gives a very brief overview the ecosystem of IIIF annotations as outgrowths of sandbox projects and Open Access initiatives at art museums and libraries. I suggest that art historians should practice “upstream annotation” by maintaining the data that constitute their annotation outputs while acknowledging the sociotechnical affordances and ephemerality of annotation spaces.