Interventions in Jacques Derrida's library

Derrida’s Margins is a website and online research tool for annotations from the Library of Jacques Derrida, housed at Princeton University Library (PUL). Jacques Derrida is one of the major figures of twentieth-century thought, and his library--which bears the traces of decades of close reading--represents a major intellectual archive. The first phase of the project focused on annotations related to Derrida’s landmark 1967 work De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology).

Works cited by Derrida in De la grammatologie were documented in a private Zotero library using a custom tagging system to indicate the location and kind of references in a particular work. That data was imported by script into a custom database, creating records for books, sections of books, and journal articles. Records were also created for references in De la grammatologie based on information encoded in the Zotero tags. The book and reference data was further cleaned and refined in the database after import; items with digital editions available from PUL were linked via IIIF. Interventions were documented by project researchers using a custom-built annotation solution, linked to digitized page images from PUL digital editions for this collection. The current phase of the project only includes structured data for annotation interventions and not insertions.