Since our original release over a decade ago, standards and services whose communities we are part of have released several significant updates. IIIF and Web Annotation have stable and completely open releases. Both the open repository at Rerum.io and the Rerum Linked Data Notification Inbox have been in broad use for years and been integrated into projects outside the Center. Finally, the core of the Rerum ecosystem, the RERUM Linked Open Data repository, has supported dozens of open knowledge publication and annotation throughout the humanities and beyond.
We have been pushing many updates to TPEN as standards have evolved but it has always happened between other projects and as a patch instead of a redesign. We have four years of formal and informal feedback regarding this upgrade and are excited to have the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities to commit to an intense two-year effort, beginning in 2024.
As is our custom, we will develop our project right here, in the open. If you would like to help, or follow along, this repository is a good place to start.
If you are a current or potential TPEN user and would like to make sure your needs are met, you can submit a desideratum or discuss an existing issue. We will be providing a single-click upgrade for any current project at t-pen.org, so feel free to get started.
We have our advisory board already selected but if you feel you have something important to contribute, leave a note in our Discussions and engage the community. This is an open project and we will support all input we can, but it is also a funded project with required deliverables.
If you are an investigator on a current or immanent project and would like to interact more directly to discover if there is an intentional connection that can be made between our works, reach out to research.computing[AT]slu.edu.
If you are excited to contribute, consider the JSON-LD, IIIF, or Web Annotation standards as well, since this project relies heavily on them. Evolving along with this is the Rerum ecosystem, which is also an open source project. Of course, we will keep posting issues here and invite you to do the same, following our Contribution Guide
We will be conducting some hiring to support this project as well, with specific information posted soon. Several undergraduate and graduate student projects will be developed in support of this project. If you would like to contribute, send your proposal to research.computing[AT]slu.edu.