**On Thursday the 23d of May, the [Open Knowledge Foundation](https://okfn.org) organised together with [Net7](http://www.netseven.it/) and the [National Library of the Netherlands](http://kb.nl) the first [Pundit](http://thepund.it) workshop aimed at digital humanities scholars and librarians. During this day, the idea of Open Humanities research was debated and Pundit was used to annotate the digitised manuscript collection of the National Library.**
After a word of welcome by Joris Pekel of the Open Knowledge Foundation he gave an introduction into open humanities research. With the network technology we have and the digitisation efforts of the cultural heritage institutions we have the potential to realise this vision of a world in which all human knowledge is freely available for everyone, a world in which scholarly discourse is unimpeded across borders and across languages.
By openly sharing not only our final papers, but also our annotations, micro-observations, notes etcetera, we allow everybody to take our data and re-use and improve them, benefiting research as a whole.
After this talk, Ed van der Vlist, curator of [medieval manuscripts](http://manuscripts.kb.nl) gave an overview of the various digitised collections of the National Library and what their plans are for the coming years. At the moment, the ‘[data services](http://www.kb.nl/banners-apis-en-meer/dataservices-apis)’ of the National Library are offering a number of open datasets for anybody to re-use without any restrictions. In the coming period more will be added.
Simone Fonda, lead developer of the Pundit annotation tool at Net7, then gave an extensive introduction about the Pundit tool.
After installing the bookmarklet which allows the user to annotate any page on the web, the scholars annotated a page from the medieval manuscript collection. To see their annotations, install the [Pundit Bookmarklet](http://thepund.it/bm/den_haag), go to [this page](http://www.kb.nl/en/web-exhibitions/highlights-from-medieval-manuscripts/signs-of-the-zodiac) and activate Pundit by clicking the bookmarklet.
Simone had prepared a couple of [exercises](http://thepund.it/exercises.php) which allowed the participants to explore all functionalities of the tool. The feedback they gave is incredibly valuable for further development of the tool and will be implemented into future version of Pundit.
All together this was a useful workshop for both the participants and the DM2E consortium as a whole and helped to further explore the potential of the web of open data and digital tools in humanities research.
With special thanks to the people at the National Library of the Netherlands for all their help to make this a successful day.
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