Jb dariah-annotation-workshop
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Slides for keynote presentation by John Bradley at DARIAH-EU workshop "Practices and Content in Contemporary Annotation Activities"
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Jb dariah-annotation-workshop
- 1. Annotation and Scholarship: how might they connect in a digital context? John Bradley (Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London) john.bradley@kcl.ac.uk For DARIAH Workshop: Practices and Context in Contemporary Annotation Activities http://www.bbaw.de/work-anno/
- 2. What DARIAH is about… DARIAH: About The grand vision for the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) is to facilitate long-term access to, and use of, all European Arts and Humanities (A+H) digital research data. DARIAH: a connected network The DARIAH infrastructure will be a connected network of people, information, tools, and methodologies for investigating, exploring and supporting work across the broad spectrum of the digital humanities. From DARIAH’s website
- 3. Annotation in scholarly culture "A new integrative perspective which combines computational and non- computational annotation practices is needed. This perspective must be aware of ongoing changing technological conditions for annotations while not ignore the fact that annotating is primarily a cultural technique.“ (from workshop announcement)
- 7. “How do you Annotation in your class?” “What am I looking for? A annotation tool that allows for collective and collaborative readings of a text and that can also handle multimedia, as well as linking (in theory) to other texts/contexts. The work in particular that I want to read in this way is a rich resource of intertextual references and allusions, so I want the students to be able to annotate and share them with each other, building a web (haha) of references and knowledge around the text.” http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-do-you-annotate-in-your-class/60101
- 8. Hypothes.is: Annotation for teaching 1. Teacher Annotations 2. Annotation as Gloss 3. Annotation as Question 4. Annotation as Close Reading 5. Annotation as Rhetorical Analysis 6. Annotation as Opinion 7. Annotation as Multimedia Writing 8. Annotation as Independent Study 9. Annotation as Annotated Bibliography 10. Annotation as Creative Act https://hypothes.is/blog/back-to-school-with-annotation-10-ways-to-annotate-with-students/
- 9. Web Annotation and its functions
- 10. 10 What to scholars do? “Until very recently, research methods were not widely discussed in English studies … – research was what you did, and the best you could hope for was a brief introduction to the vagaries of the library.” “significant numbers of English studies academics in the UK” are still “surprisingly in- or possibly non-articulate about what they do to achieve … results” Gabriele Griffin (ed.) Research Methods for English Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2005. There are “considerably fewer works” available about scholarly practice for the humanities than for the sciences. Palmer, C. L. and Cragin, M. (2007). "Scholarly Information work and Disciplinary Practices". In ARIST Vol. 42
- 11. Taxonomy of Digital Research Activites in the Humanities https://github.com/dhtaxonomy/TaDiRAH
- 13. Published Image Annotation in KCL’s “Art of Making” project http://www.artofmaking.ac.uk/
- 14. My Pliny Project http://pliny.cch.kcl.ac.uk Bradley, John (2008). “Pliny: A model for digital support of scholarship”. In Journal of Digital Information (JoDI). Vol 9 No 1 (formally No. 26). Online at http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/209/198.
- 15. Primary sources Editions Primary sources Manuscripts, Art objects, other “data” 2ndary literature (interpretative) Document-oriented view
- 16. The “idea cloud” Primary sources Editions Primary sources Manuscripts, Art objects, other “data” 2ndary literature (interpretative) Ideas, concepts, arguments, debates (formally ill-defined)
- 17. Adding digital methods into the picture Primary sources Editions Primary sources Manuscripts, Art objects, other “data” 2ndary literature (interpretative) Ideas, concepts, arguments, debates (formally ill-defined) Semantic Web (?) Digital Text (TEI)
- 18. Fitting the scholar in the picture Primary sources Editions Primary sources Manuscripts, Art objects, other “data” 2ndary literature (interpretative) Ideas, concepts, arguments, debates (formally ill-defined) Semantic Web (?) Digital Text (TEI) Personal (mind)
- 19. Finding annotation in the picture Primary sources Editions Primary sources Manuscripts, Art objects, other “data” 2ndary literature (interpretative) Ideas, concepts, arguments, debates (formally ill-defined) Semantic Web (?) Digital Text (TEI) Personal (mind)
- 20. 20 Reading, and notetaking in scholarly research For many researchers, scholarly research is: Derived from extensive reading Across a broad range of sources (primary and secondary) Intensive reading of key sources Involves notetaking and annotation • Drawn from William S. Brockman, Laura Neumann, Carole L. Palmer, Tonyia J. Tidline (December 2001): Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment, a report from the Council on Library and Information Resources. "Users have been introduced to all sorts of interesting things that can be done with computer analysis or electronic resources, but very few of them have been asked what it is that they do, and want to keep doing, which is to study texts by reading them.” Warwick, C. (2004). “Print Scholarship and Digital Resources” in Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (eds). A Companion to Digital Humanities Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. pp 369-370.
- 21. 21 Lavagnino: Reading, Scholarship, and Hypertext Editions …something that is rarely mentioned in any kind of literary scholarship: on reading as an involving process, not as interpretation or decoding. It is reading as an experience and not as mere collection of data: it can lead to interpretation, but only by way of generating reactions that we subsequently seek to describe or explain… Lavagnino, John (1997). “Reading, Scholarship, and Hypertext Editions”, in The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Sept 1997 Vol 3 No 1 <URL http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03- 01/reading.html>.
- 22. 22 Scholarly Annotation “If … I really have to study, learn and absorb what’s in [something I’m reading], I make a photocopy and I write in the margins. And I underline, too. But I almost never underline without writing in the margin…Otherwise, I can find myself simply underlining, rather than absorbing” quote in Brockman et al 2001 Also evidence of annotation in research in Catherine Marshall’s work: Marshall, C.C. (1998). “Toward an ecology of hypertext annotation”. In Proceedings HyperText 98. ACM. Pp. 40-49 Marshall, C.C. and Brush A.J.B. (2004). "Exploring the Relationship between Personal and Public Annotations". In Proceedings JCDL '04. ACM. pp. 349-57.
- 23. Blair: Note taking and intellectual achievement "We have particularly delegated longterm memory to media outside the mind. Nonetheless, we still rely on human memory and human judgment at the centre of intellectual achievement. Notes must be rememorated or brought back into active memory at least enough to be intelligently integrated into an argument; judgment can only be applied to experiences that are present to the mind.“ Blair, Ann (2004). “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission”. In Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 2003), p 107
- 24. 24 Notetaking: a hidden phase of knowledge transmission “Note taking constitutes a central but often hidden phase in the transmission of knowledge” (p. 85) “… Michel Foucault reportedly expressed a desire to study copybooks of quotations because they seemed to him to be ‘works on the shelf…not imposed by the individual’; they promised to give quasi-psychoanalytic insight into the thinking of the individual reader free to choose what was worthy of attention” (p. 88) Blair, Ann (2004). “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission”. In Critical Inquiry 31. University of Chicago. 24
- 25. An annotation tool by itself only takes us so far It would seem that existing Digital Annotation tools could be used to support the “first phase” of scholarship: the reading of material and reacting to it. To be useful in research, however, they need to engage, somehow, with process of “rememorating” or drawing on these reactions.
- 26. 26 The page is at the “nexus” Publishing Application •Preparing text •book design and presentation •Printing •Distribution •The printing press The page is the nexus between publishing and annotation Research Application •Support dynamic text •Support using of annotations •The pen
- 27. Humanities research as process, and its research output Humanities Research as process SourceSecond’ry Sources Source SourcePrimary Sources Research OutputResearch Process Emerging Ideas Holmer, Joan Ozark (1994). “Draw, if you be Men”: Saviolo’s Significance for Romeo and Juliet”. In Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 45 No 2 (Summer 1994). pp. 163-189
- 28. “The space between the reading and note taking and the writing” "[Synthesis] happens in that space between the reading and the note taking and the writing, because it's what precipitates the writing, the need to write. The ability to write. The possibility of writing. And then it happens again, sometimes, on a revision.“ “I don’t think that . . . in the humanities those breakthrough things are moments. They’re more like a six-month period . . . where I start to see how things fit together in a way that I didn’t before, because so many different texts have to be pulled together.” (p. 25) Two scholars, quoted in Broughton et al 2001
- 29. 29 The screen as the “nexus” PDF Viewer •Reading PDF file •Layout on the screen •Supporting page turning, etc Pliny •Support display of annotations •Manage notes and anchors •Support work with notes
- 30. Thinking about Scholarship and Annotation
- 31. 31 Pliny objects as a connected graph: a “Mind Map” An example of a mindmap Graham Burnett (2005) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:M indmap.gif 31
- 32. Notes and the Interpretative and Writing Processes Concept 1 Concept 2 “recontextualising” Paper 1 Paper 2 Reading Interpreting Writing Scholarship and … Formsl elements …
- 33. Adding DH methodologies into the picture Primary sources Editions Primary sources Manuscripts, Art objects, other “data” 2ndary literature (interpretative) Ideas, concepts, arguments, debates (formally ill-defined) Semantic Web (?) Digital Text (TEI) Personal (mind) Analysis Tool (Software)
- 34. 34 Annotating Everything: application output Software output from: Bradley and Rockwell (1997). Simweb Correspondance Analysis Visualizer. URL: http://tactweb.mcmaster.ca/cgi-dos/simweb/simweb.bat
- 35. 35 Annotating everything: process descriptions Comments added by researcher while building the flow diagram
- 36. “Annotating Everything” Annotation has a place while working not only with texts, but with all kinds of data formats and displays In all these contexts, it acts as a nexus between what the material is showing and what the researcher is getting from it. More thinking about this in the context of Pliny in Bradley, John (2012), "Towards a richer sense of Digital Annotation: Moving beyond a 'media' orientation of the annotation of digital objects". In Digital Humanities Quarterly. 2012.6.2.
- 37. 37 Annotation as a kind of “glue” between applications Document Page PDF Viewer Webpage Browser Document Page PDF Viewer CATMA Display Catma WordHoard Display WordHoard Concept Concept Note Concept Pliny ? RDF Bradley, John and Michele Pasin (2013). Fitting Personal Interpretations with the Semantic Web. Draft online at http://pliny.cch.kcl.ac.uk/docs/f itting-Bradley-Pasin.pdf
- 38. Finding annotation in the picture Primary sources Editions Primary sources Manuscripts, Art objects, other “data” 2ndary literature (interpretative) Ideas, concepts, arguments, debates (formally ill-defined) Semantic Web (?) Digital Text (TEI) Personal (mind) Analysis Tool (Software)
- 39. 39 The screen as the “nexus” PDF Viewer •Reading PDF file •Layout on the screen •Supporting page turning, etc Pliny •Support display of annotations •Manage notes and anchors •Support work with notes
- 40. Thinking about Scholarship and Annotation
- 41. 41 Annotation as a kind of “glue” Document Page PDF Viewer Webpage Browser Document Page PDF Viewer CATMA Display Catma WordHoard Display WordHoard Concept Concept Note Concept Pliny ? RDF
- 42. Thank you! Works referenced (1): Bessette, L.S. (2015). “How Do You Annotation in Your Class? In The Chrolicle of Higher Education ProfHacker blog. http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-do-you-annotate-in-your-class/60101 Borek, Luise, Quinn Dombrowski, Jody Perkins, Christof Schöch, Matthew Munson (20`4). "Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities". GitHub website at https://github.com/dhtaxonomy/TaDiRAH Blair, Ann (2004). “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission”. In Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 2003). Bradley, John (2008). “Pliny: A model for digital support of scholarship”. In Journal of Digital Information (JoDI). Vol 9 No 1 (formally No. 26). Online at http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/209/198. Bradley, John (2012), "Towards a richer sense of Digital Annotation: Moving beyond a 'media' orientation of the annotation of digital objects". In Digital Humanities Quarterly. 2012.6.2. Bradley, John and Michele Pasin (2013). Fitting Personal Interpretations with the Semantic Web. Draft online at http://pliny.cch.kcl.ac.uk/docs/fitting-Bradley-Pasin.pdf Brockman, William S., Laura Neumann, Carole L. Palmer, Tonyia J. Tidline (2001): Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment, a report from the Council on Library and Information Resources. December 2001. Carpenter, Todd (2013). “iAnnotate: What Happened to the Web as an Annotation System”. In blog “The Scholarly Kitchen”. Society for Scholarly Publishing. Dean, Jeremy (2015). “Back to School with Annotation: 10 Ways to Annotate with Students”. In Hypothesis.is Blog https://hypothes.is/blog/back-to-school-with-annotation-10-ways-to-annotate-with-students/
- 43. Thank you! Works referenced (2): Griffin, G (ed.) Research Methods for English Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2005. Hypothesis.is. Website at https://hypothes.is/about/ Lavagnino, John (1997). “Reading, Scholarship, and Hypertext Editions”, in The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Sept 1997 Vol 3 No 1 <URL http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-01/reading.html>. Marshall, C.C. (1998). “Toward an ecology of hypertext annotation”. In Proceedings HyperText 98. ACM. Pp. 40-49 Marshall, C.C. and Brush A.J.B. (2004). "Exploring the Relationship between Personal and Public Annotations". In Proceedings JCDL '04. ACM. pp. 349-57. Palmer, C. L. and Cragin, M. (2007). "Scholarly Information work and Disciplinary Practices". In ARIST Vol. 42 Pliny (2011). Pliny project website. http://pliny.cch.kcl.ac.uk Warwick, C. (2004). “Print Scholarship and Digital Resources” in Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (eds). A Companion to Digital Humanities Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. pp 369-370. Wootton, W., Bradley, J., and Russell, B. (2013). "The Art of Making in Antiquity". Website at http://www.artofmaking.ac.uk/
Editor's Notes
- First, I’d like to thank Chris Meister, Mareike Hoechendorff and Niels-Oliver Walkowski for inviting me to take part in this workshop. Although my work in this area, as I hope you shall see, is only in part about digital annotation – thinking about annotation does play a role in what I have been doing, and I hope I have an interesting perspective to present to you on the place of annotation in humanities scholarship.
- What I particularly like about the DARIAH initiative is its aim to explore how digital technology can connect digital research data to the work of humanists. It is, indeed must be, in part technology driven – but as a project it is interested in drawing its vision not only about what the technology can do, but what humanities research is about, and how these two pieces might best fit together.
- … and we can see the recognition of this in the announcement for this workshop: that one needs what was called here a “integrative perspective”, which not only thinks about what the technology enables, but also what non-computational annotational practices reveals to us about how humanities research operates. This seems to me to be the best way to effectively connect digital technologies to cultural practices of humanities scholarship. So let us take up this challenge: Like so many digital activities, the idea of Annotation goes back to before the digital era, and digital annotation to some extent consciously imitates the pre-digital -- and is, indeed, often in part motivated by it. What can we see in established annotation practice in scholarship that can usefully inform our thinking about digital annotation? In my work on a computer system for scholarship called “Pliny”, I have explored some of these issues directly, and, indeed from this work, I will be arguing that annotation and indeed more generally notetaking have been important scholarly activities for centuries, and there are good reasons to believe that they are still a part of the scholarly workflow today. They also, exactly as this workshop wants to explore, throw light on the place of annotation in scholarship in ways that – I think – can usefully influence our thinking about digital annotation too.
- Most recently annotation has resurfaced again in the context of the WWW, and the term “web annotation” has begun to be used. Here is the beginning of Wikipedia’s definition of “web annotation”: “A web annotation is an online annotation associated with a web resource, typically a web page. With a Web annotation system, a user can add, modify or remove information from a Web resource without modifying the resource itself. The annotations can be thought of as a layer on top of the existing resource, and this annotation layer is usually visible to other users who share the same annotation system. In such cases, the web annotation tool is a type of social software tool.” Many good and useful conceptual issues are raised here. For our purposes, however, the reference to web annotation as a social concept is an important part of this concept of annotation, and this aspect of its conception is reinforced when we look at Wikipedia’s list of purposes for web annotation. We must presume that the list is meant to provide examples, rather than being exhaustive: to rate a Web resource, such as by its usefulness, user-friendliness, suitability for viewing by minors. to improve or adapt its contents by adding/removing material, something like a wiki. as a collaborative tool, e.g. to discuss the contents of a certain resource. as a medium of artistic or social criticism, by allowing Web users to reinterpret, enrich or protest against institution or ideas that appear on the Web. to quantify transient relationships between information fragments.” Let us take a moment to consider this list. The focus of almost all the examples is on digital annotation as a social operation; as a communication tool, between the annotator and a public user community. Of course, this kind of public communication is an important component in the work of a scholar. Scholars publish to their own research community – making their ideas public there. Furthermore, through their teaching, and through their broader engagement, as experts, in the broader society they do find another component of their scholarly work as public communication. Further still, we often hear these days about collaboration as a previously neglected part of scholarship, and here annotation is discussed as a collaborative component of resource creation. And, indeed, the fourth point is perhaps the most relevant to us, since scholarship can often be framed as acts of reinterpretation or enrichment – although here it is placed in a artistic or social context which, in my view, misses an important part of the picture. In summary, then, regardless of that fact that these are important components of scholarship, I don’t think that this social component of scholarship that this view of web annotation presents, is the whole story, or even – truth be told – the primary centre of it.
- Continuing a little further in the article we come to the “features” section which classifies various annotation software tools. I am showing you the beginning of the features section to show you the headers for the classification scheme in use, followed by the entry for a particularly rich and interesting annotation tool that has recently emerged, “Hypothes.is”: The focus of the feature list shown here is on the ability (or not) to share annotations, or notes – on the place of annotation in public and group contexts, and the ability to create notes that have some formatting features of the kind we are used to now-a-days for digital textual objects: things like paragraph indenting, lists, italics, etc. How well do these issues relate to how an annotation tool supports scholarship in the humanities? Perhaps, not surprisingly given the social context we were given for annotation at the beginning of the article, the focus is on a social function for annotation, and, with not only the social issue of permissions and access, but also the interest in the formatting of text, in ways to ensure that any annotation created could meet adequate expressive capabilities expected for what is to be a public utterance. Here, again, if we think of web annotation as a tool of scholarship, it would appear that only its social component is being considered in its design.
- A moment ago I mentioned Hypothes.is as a recent emerging technology to support annotation, and I praised its ability to wring useful annotation services out of the set of technologies that make up the web. Technologies which, truth be told, still give up their support of social, multiperson operations reluctantly. At the bottom of it all, the technologies of the WWW are not well thought through for issues involving annotation, and to get the standard technologies available through a web browser to support annotation of web pages is quite an accomplishment. Looking at the stated aims of Hypothes.is helps us to see how they might fit with our aims of finding a place for annotation in scholarship. Here is the opening bit of their “about” page: Our team is building an open platform for discussion on the web. It leverages annotation to enable sentence-level critique or note-taking on top of news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and more. Everything we build is guided by our principles. In particular that it be free, open, non-profit, neutral and lasting to name a few. There are many admirable things here. The open nature of the platform, and the aim to create technology that is both long lasting, and supports annotations that are long lasting too is really important. The aim, stated elsewhere on Hypothes.is’s site, of a web with annotations that is “controlled by internet citizens instead of website owners”, aiming to “serve all of humanity” that allows “comment to be free” fits well with the most admirable vision of humanities scholarship too. The list of the kinds of objects which Hypothes.is claims to support for annotation is also suggestive of the kinds of domains in which they think their tool fits, although the list is, of course, rather informal – suggestive rather than exhaustive. We see “scientific articles”, which suggest annotation for research, and (presumably web-based) books – of perhaps all kinds. News and blogs also fits into the kind of things that might well be of interest to scholars. Other items in the list suggest more a political or social domain, which fits with their grandest vision for digital annotation that I mentioned a moment ago.
- One area for web annotation as a social function that could be useful in the life of the scholar is digital annotation for classroom teaching. Here’s a post from May 2015 to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog site ProfHacher that raises the issue. The author, Lee Bessette, asks for “A[n] annotation tool that allows for collective and collaborative readings of a text. […] I want the students to be able to annotate and share them with each other, building a web (haha) of references and knowledge around the text.” Clearly, the focus here is on teaching, and Bessette is thinking about getting the students to engage collectively in the work of interpreting a particular text. Hence, Bessette thinks of the need for a “collective tool” for annotation so that he and all his students can pitch in. The work he hopes will be done IS indeed similar to what happens in scholarly interpretation of a text, even when done collectively rather than individually. The “haha” here is interesting, and, to me at least, suggests a kind of scepticism about the whole project. I suspect it will probably be hard work to get the students to engage deeply enough with the text that they can contribute meaningfully to this aim (this is, indeed, probably what Bessette’s “haha” means), but I also think that that textual web annotation, by itself, is unlikely to be a good enough an expressive environment to enable a sophisticated web of knowledge to emerge. Collective annotation, by itself, -- the attaching of textual notes to a text – is insufficient to support the development and expression of complex thought.
- It turns out that Hypothesis.is decided that they were interested in the pedagogical application of their tool and hired a “director of education to focus on pedagogical applications” for this technology… .… and, indeed, their new director of education posted a discussion about possible places for Hypothes.is for teaching. I have listed the 10 ways they suggest of how annotation in Hypothes.is can be used in teaching here. Of course teaching is not the same thing as scholarly research, but in the Humanities there are connections. Several of the items here – particularly items 1 to 6, and perhaps 9, would be uses for annotation that are useful to teaching, but also for humanities scholarly research too. Here, again, though, we cannot say that teaching with annotation necessarily covers all the important functions of research. Although teaching is a possible application of an annotation tool like Hypothes.is, it, by itself, cannot be considered as a full representation of how scholarship is done, and what it is about. So, instead of looking at examples of annotation activities that current web technologies allow us to express that are useful in scholarship, I think we need a different kind of thinking, since driving our thinking about social annotation and web technologies misses out, I think, on important activities that scholars do. Perhaps it is useful to step back from what the technology can do for annotation for a moment and think about what scholarship consists of more broadly, and how annotation might fit into it. To me, at least, the examples listed here, and many other parts of the Hypothes.is site suggest some excellent thinking about annotation for public, social, purposes – indeed the sentence which Hypothes.is evidently wants to use to capture what they are about, “To enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge” – which we saw on their “about us” page a moment ago – makes this very plain. However, I think that if one takes a broad view of what scholarship is about – the work involved in doing scholarship, and the place of annotation and notetaking within it, social annotation is only a part of the whole picture, and I would argue only a small part.
- So, here we have seen several attempts to present a context for web annotation. To a large sense, they are all described as social – but I think that one could say that in none of these examples capture the full range of what scholarship is all about. Let us, then, take a moment now to think more generally about exactly this: what scholarship is about. From there, we can see places where annotation fits, and can, then, make some attempt to define some characteristics for annotation that would fit these requirements.
- It is true that it is not easy to find out, in ways that help our task here, what scholars actually do in their research. Even sources with promising names like Griffin’s “Research Methods for English Studies” warns us in the books’ introduction that: “Until very recently, research methods were not widely discussed in English studies … – research was what you did, and the best you could hope for was a brief introduction to the vagaries of the library.” “significant numbers of English studies academics in the UK” are still “surprisingly in- or possibly non-articulate about what they do to achieve … results” Other researchers, such as Palmer and Cragin, who have published studies on the work habits and methods of scholars from various domains tell us that there are “considerably fewer works” available about scholarly practice for the humanities than for the sciences.
- Some recent work by a cousin DARIAH project called “TaDeeRah” is worth thinking about here for a moment. It’s not completely right for our interests because it is focused on Digital research in the Humanities, and we are interested here more fundamentally about what Humanities scholarship is about. The most developed part of the taxonomy, and the part that is most relevant to us here, is its Activities theme.
- … and when we look there we see here Annotation described as one of the Enrichment kinds of research activities. It seems to be thought of as a kind of publication exercise: material is being linked to an existing object – usually a document – and this is not a traditional publishing action to be sure, but the object that is attached enriches the object being annotated. It makes new statements about that object that might not be evident to everyone from the object itself.
- We at DDH have done this kind of annotation. Here is a project in which I was involved called the “Art of Making” which worked with images of Roman sculpture looking for evidence of how the object was made – what tools were used by the sculptor, what processes seemed to be underway, etc. We used annotation as a kind of enrichment of the image to point out places where the project thought evidence could be seen on these images. I believe that this is the kind of annotation – the kind of use for annotation – that TaDiRAH was thinking of. However, I think we can make two observations about how annotation is described here that is relevant to our discussion: First, when we think about annotation in traditional scholarship we might note that it doesn’t quite fit the description here. Most scholarly annotation in, say, a book, is meant to record – to make explicit – the reader’s thoughts at the time the reading was being done – but often the annotation itself it not “explicit” in the sense I think is meant here. The note can easily be more exploratory – to open up thinking rather than to definitively organise and finish it. This is, perhaps, one hint that annotation, as conceived of here, still has – like our earlier examples – a kind of publishing, public character to it: an expression of completed thinking rather than developing thinking. Second, it seems to me that if one wants to think about the various scholarly activities further, that it would be fruitful to take the categories provided within TaDiRAH’s activities theme and explore how the activities categorised here interconnect. One connection (between “capture” and “enrichment” is noted in the heading for Enrichment), but there are many more interconnections between TaDiRAH’s activities that are useful to recognise. Just above the Enrichment section, for instance, we can see one of TaDiRAH’s “creation” activities: writing. How does writing, say, and annotation connect together? I did not see reading (!!) listed as a scholarly activity in TaDiRAH – perhaps because of its Digital Research focus – but if it did, how does reading as a scholarly activity fit with annotation? A useful direction for us, then, is perhaps to explore connections between research activities as a kind of, let us say, research workflow.
- I’ve been thinking about how digital technology could fit very broadly with scholarly research since I began my Pliny project back in 2005. As the first paragraph on Pliny’s website states, with the Pliny project I was trying to look very broadly at how digital tools could support scholarship, and I produced an demonstration pieces of software also called Pliny which “facilities note-taking and annotation -- a key element of Humanities research for many scholars.”, but which went beyond annotation by itself to explore how a tool could allow a scholar to “to integrate these initial notes into a representation of an evolving personal interpretation -- perhaps one of the key goals of scholarly research”. As well as material at the Pliny website, and a demonstration piece of software, I have published on what the Pliny project is about in both the JoDI and LLC journals. Out of this work I have developed a conception of how research in the humanities often works, and where annotation fits into this. As a result of this thinking, I’d like to be brave and present a simplistic graphical presentation of this to you now.
- We start off with a “document” oriented view of the process. I warned you just a moment ago that my diagramming here will be rather simplistic, and we can already see one of these simplifications come into view! Here, I say “document-oriented”, but, of course, one must acknowledge that not all objects of study for the humanities are documents. Art works, for example, need to be included, and these days we have a growing interest in, say, data from social media. I am calling all these things: things like historical administrative manuscript documents, early modern printed books, contemporary artworks, data from social media – all things that a humanities scholar might wish to study -- “Primary Sources” here. Some primary sources become the focus of intense study by scholars, and they produce editions of these objects. I would include here not only, say, editions, of Plato, but also other works that are not so clearly thought of as editions such as the historical art world’s “catalogue resonees”. These are objects which other scholars as users treat to some extent as representation of the primary sources, and, for their purposes, as if they were the actual primary sources themselves. Sitting here above these two kinds of objects of study are further documents: the secondary literature which scholars create to represent their scholarship. One way or another, they draw on materials from the two categories of primary sources in their writings. I have categorized the material in this secondary literature that scholars produce as “interpretative” in that almost all pieces of this secondary literature presents a particular perspective, or interpretation, on the materials being studied: a perspective developed often by an individual scholar, (or perhaps these days by some kind of multi-scholar cooperative that the digital world has enabled). The secondary literature is often heavily self-referential: a writer of a document it in will not only refer to his or her primary sources, but also to material written by other scholars in this secondary literature materials. When we consider scholarship done in the past with scholarship done today, the size of this secondary literature is vast. Much of it, probably almost all of it, is textual. Narrative text that presents an argument or a position on an issue of interest to the scholar, is generally based, one way or another, on a set of primary sources. There are probably millions of documents one would consider to be secondary literature, and perhaps for any particular scholarly discipline, thousands or tens of thousands. Indeed, Vannevar Bush’s expression of concern, given way back in the 1940s in his famous and influential As we may think article – that the challenge of a modern researcher is simply to keep up with his or her subdiscipline and its secondary literature seems to be truer than ever!
- Related to the secondary literature, but not often formally presented in thinking about how scholarship works, is the set of ideas in a humanities discipline, both current thinking by contemporary scholars and ideas from the past. Here I show this as a cloud because this “domain” of almost any discipline in the humanities is only rather vaguely defined. The shared ideas are only partially represented or formally expressed, can be constantly debated, and are therefore under revision. Different scholars will have different understandings about even common concepts in their discipline. The degree to which the ideas or concepts are represented “globally” here, then, is debatable – even when serious work is done to clarify concepts in this area it is likely that different humanists will have slightly different understandings of them. The ideas for any particular humanities discipline here exist, if they really exist at all, then, in some sort of global mind, as it were, of humanists working in that discipline round the world. The understandings they represent only take concrete form in the documents of the secondary literature, and even there they are usually not set out in any formal way, but generally described in narrative. Hence I show here the two arrows of influence between the “idea cloud” and the body of secondary literature. The secondary literature describes, and in some sense represents the cloud, and the cloud of ideas influences the secondary literature – explicitly to each piece of secondary literature, and also implicitly.
- If we think about the digital context for this figure for a moment, we can see that there has been significant work to define digital representation for these various components. First, and very prominent, we have the TEI project which has worked on the representation of textual material for editions and other scholarly work of that kind. There has been, of course, work also on non-textual sources, but none of it, as far as I am aware, is as far advanced as TEI. There has been less effective thought about the handling of the documents in secondary literature, shown by the fact that I suspect that most scholarly articles today are written in word processors like Microsoft Word., although tools to manage HTML pages in the WWW world may have begun to have some impact here. Furthermore, the formal work on annotation as presented in, say, the OA ontology and the work in some disciplines of what is called “Semantic Annotation”, shows a growing understanding of the nature of the interconnection between documents and ideas. Here, then, I introduce the Semantic Web toolkit as a set of technologies that might tackle the formal representation of the at least some part of the shared “cloud of ideas, concepts, etc” that I just talked about. Perhaps it will be rich enough to represent my “idea cloud”, the shared domain of a particular humanities field. Indeed in some disciplines, such as some fields in the life sciences, these Semantic Web technologies are beginning achieve exactly this. Even if this shows promises in certain sciences, I think there must still be a significant amount of work to be done to think about how one might exploit RDF and its related technologies to adequately capture the complexities and ambiguities of a humanities scholarly domain – indeed, if it can be done at all! We do see some formalisation of parts of humanities research through things like the ideas of structured prosopography, explored in several of the projects I have been involved in (for example the People of Medieval Scotland, or the Making of Charlemagne’s Europe). In these areas, then, one can in fact see a bit of formalism creeping into the formally amorphous “idea cloud”. So, this figure as a whole – with its parts representing primary and secondary sources, and – albeit vaguely – the set of ideas that constitute a discipline in the humanities – might be considered to be very simple representation of the “public” and shared part of scholarship. However, much of this discipline vision – everything perhaps above the primary sources themselves – is created by scholars. Where do they fit in?
- Here, then, we see the researcher or scholar on the left. That part of her or his mind that is involved in what we might call broadly “scholarly thinking” is shown by a cloud shown above the head in my diagram. I’m going to call this cloud the “mindspace” below for the want of a better term. The arrows show the kind of interaction between the mindspace of the individual scholar (or perhaps team of scholars in a collaborative ventures) and the public scholarly world that I just described a moment ago. From the bottom: The arrow from primary sources into this “mindspace” represents that the scholar is likely to be working with some kind of primary sources, and that these sources give him/her ideas that will hopefully fit with his research. I remind you that I don’t think of these primary sources as being only manuscripts, but also all kind of primary source materials that a scholar might be interested these days in, including even things like data from social media. Moving up to the next pair of arrows. Our scholar might also be working with editions prepared by others, or might be preparing an edition him/herself – perhaps using techniques and technologies implied by TEI. If TEI is involved, it is likely that the scholar will think of the results of the work of preparing the edition as, at least in one representation of it, a digital object. Moving up again, we consider the connection between the scholar and secondary literature: he or she will, of course, be reading extensively from secondary literature related to his discipline. Any scholar needs to be aware of the work done both in the past and in the present in their area of interest. This is represented by the arrow from the secondary literature box into the “mind cloud”. The arrow pointing from the scholar’s mindcloud to secondary literature represents his/her contributions to the field. In the great majority of cases – from both non-digital, but also digital humanists – these products are texts in the form of articles and books, although here there are those in the digital humanities who are arguably working to expand the definition of what constitutes a contribution to the field be considering including things like, say, software, or collections of semantic web data. It is important to note that a contribution from a scholar, if it is taken up by others in the field, will affect the cloud of ideas, concepts, and perhaps the arguments and debates going on in the cloud above my secondary literature box. Unless or until a significant part of this cloud has some formal representation, it will not be possible, though a structural contribution such as a set of semantic web data, to affect any kind of formal representation directly, either in the public sphere, or in the mind of the scholars that are in the community of a particular discipline. However, it is in the minds of human beings that new ideas emerge. This is true not only in the humanities, but in all fields of scholarly endeavour. For, of course, scholarly writing as the principle vehicle for sharing new ideas with a scholarly discipline is not only the domain of the humanities. Ideas are still transmitted in the sciences, say, by scholarly papers describing and interpreting research work. Although ideas end up being formally presented through secondary literature papers, any work in digital scholarship is leaving out something very important if what goes on in the mind of the scholar is not a substantial part of the model that is being developed. Finally, the scholar might well take up ideas that s/he collects from the cloud more directly: through discussions with colleagues, say. So, you say, this is all very nice (although perhaps overly simplistic). But your talk, John, is supposed to be about annotation, where is annotation in all this? If one considers the document-part of this diagram there are many examples of annotation that could be caught by annotation technologies there: references between secondary and primary literature, and between secondary literature components in particular. Also, editions might well contain annotations providing references to other primary and secondary sources. But my own work has not been really with these “public” and “published” annotations. The Pliny project is about the role of annotation in the work of the scholar as he or she develops their own ideas. Where are annotations there?
- I will be arguing that the blue arrows often represent annotation or notetaking acts by the scholar that are of interest to me with the Pliny project. Of course, this work of taking in material from the primary and secondary world into the scholar’s mind is not done by annotation or notetaking exclusively. A thought that becomes an important component in a future paper might well occur in the mind of the scholar simply through, say, the casual reading of an article. However, there are reasons to think that annotation or notetaking play a major role in helping most scholars absorb and preserve ideas that they have when engaging with primary and secondary materials.
- My understanding of the place of annotation or notetaking in scholarship began to emerge when I read a study by a group of researchers at the University of Illinois back in 2004 entitled Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment. This work was published by the Council of Library and Information Resources and much of it, not surprisingly, has a kind of library or archive document-oriented perspective on humanities scholarship – not quite the focus I have in mind here. However, even then, Brockman et al went beyond this document focus to include the scholar/user in the picture, and to think about what they do. It recognised that there is an extensive amount of reading of primary and secondary sources in research (an observation also noted by Claire Warwick), and that this reading involved a significant amount of notetaking and annotation by the reader. Later I became aware of further work by Carole Palmer, such as the ARIST study I mentioned earlier, which also supports this perspective.
- This view of one of the key aspects of scholarship as reading and perhaps notetaking too is also echoed in this quote from this now rather old article by John Lavagnino: that reading is an involving process, and is an experience which produces reactions in the mind of the scholar that s/he might subsequently seek to describe or explain. How are these reactions that Lavagnino mentioned captured during this reading?
- Here, in a quote from a humanities researcher that was interviewed for the CLIR study, we see now annotation or notetaking acts as the connection between the material being read – here assumed to be a primary or secondary source, and the mind of the scholar. The writing of the note facilitates the absorption of the reactions of the scholar – fixing them better in the mind so that they can be recalled and used later. Similar conclusions can be drawn from the work of Catherine Marshall – a computer scientist researcher now at Texas A&M University – in her study of the annotation practices of students in textbooks, and in her work on categorising the different dimensions of annotation.
- Ann Blair is an historian who has looked at the place of notetaking in intellectual work from Early Modern times to the 20th century. Here, she notes the place of these notes or annotation in the process of scholarship. This material becomes a resource that the scholar can draw on by recalling – or, as she says, rememorating – ideas that came to him/her during the reading. Obviously, if ideas that emerge in reading are to have a place in any new thinking at all, they have to remembered – to be brought back into active memory later when they are relevant.
- Elsewhere in this same article Blair explores the relationship between the notes and an individual’s personal views. Michel Foucault’s observations notetaking draws our attention to their very personal character, and she also points out, elsewhere, that notetaking or scholarly annotation “constitutes a central but often hidden phase in the transmission of knowledge”. How is she thinking of annotation in the context of the transmission of knowledge? Well, think of a process that starts with set of notes, and ends with a new text describing a new product of someone’s research. At the beginning of this train of processes are the annotations.
- This is where, I think, there is something interesting to say about scholarly annotation that I rarely hear said elsewhere. Tools, such as Hypothes.is clearly support this first phase of scholarship, the reading and reacting to materials one has read, and they might arguably do this really well. However, they then leave you at this starting point. After you have read 100s of documents, inserted 1000s of notes into them, how do you then recall them – “rememorate them as Blair described it – for effective use in your research?
- Here is an “application” perspective on annotation that I have found helpful in thinking about this. A personal copy of a printed book, in FRBR terms the “Item”, can be owned by a scholar and s/he can write personal notes or annotations in his/her copy to help capture and fix his/her observations as she works through it. The annotations as handwritten notes share the space of the page, but although they co-exist with the printed text, they are very evidently different in nature from the text with which they co-exist. Both the printed text and the notes are text, but simply the way they look – how visually contrasting they are – shows that they are quite different things. Seeing a page like this, I think it is obvious that the printed page represents the end of, let us call it, the publishing application: the work involved in taking the text from the author and processing it into the printed book. Some stages of the production of this book are listed here to the left, along with the tools involved in its production. The result is a public object: the published book. Although the book is the product of the publishing application that produced it, the pages in this individual copy or instance also share the page with the reader’s annotations – the first phase what I am calling here a “research application”. Although the annotations share the space here with the product of the publishing application they are very different in character: Three obvious differences: whereas the text of the book is typeset in ink, the text of the annotation is handwritten in pen; whereas the text of this book flows on consecutive lines arranged vertically on the page, the annotations use their space rather more freely. whereas the printed text appears in every copy or instance of the printed book, the annotations are unique to this particular copy. Finally, whereas the print in the book represents the end of the publishing application, the annotation represents the beginning of the annotation application: whose function is to reinforce, and then feed into the thinking of the reader about this text. Overall, then, the annotation in the book represents the nexus between the public process that produced the book, and the private process that creates the thinking in the mind of the reader – a transition point between the book as the endpoint of a process that resulted in a public expression of the ideas of its writer, and the written notes as the beginning of a personal reflection by the person who wrote them.
- So, if the annotation in the book is the start of a new process – what is this process? Here we can see an orange box that represents what I am characterising as the research process. Its output is research output – for the humanities, and indeed for the sciences too – the output is often an article for a scholarly journal, or perhaps (for the humanities at least) a monograph. The process in which the research work is carried out is a mental one. It’s intent is to result in new ideas in the mind of the researcher that are suitable for sharing with the broader community through a publication. One of the inputs from these sources into the research process are the annotations or notes. Although they are not the only inputs by any means, for many researchers they are a very important input component. Although notes, then, provide one of the inputs for research, what is their role once they are involved in it? Ann Blair has already given us a hint about the place of notes taken from primary and secondary sources in this process: a note is useful in research when the ideas it records are remembered at the right time and fit into the eventual product of the research.
- Broughton et al doesn’t spell out in detail what happens between the reading and notetaking and the production of scholarly output. However, it is clear that these is a process involved that happens over time, that involves the bringing together materials and reactions from different sources, and is, somehow, enabled by the writing. I also assume that this evidently difficult task of synthesis into a new set of ideas is facilitated by the notes taken during the reading. How, then, can the computer help with this mental synthesis process? This is part of what the Pliny project was about.
- While creating the Pliny software that is a part of the Pliny project, I was aware of the “nexus” nature of annotation. Here is an echo of the “nexus” diagram that we saw earlier for the printed page, but this time being reconsidered in the context of the computer screen. Because we’re now working in a digital context, the software applications on the publishing side are a little different from the paper-print ones, although the character of the two of them is quite similar. Here, the page of an article is presented to us through a PDF viewer application, which has a particular set of functions, including reading and decoding the PDF file, doing the layout of page elements on the screen, and supporting user functions such as page turning etc. The PDF presentation is, as the book was before, the endpoint of this time one kind of digital publication. What the PDF application needs to do is clear enough. What, however, should be the computer’s role in the other side of the nexus: the research application? Here, just as in the book, the first step is the creation of notes to record a reaction to the materials being read. Hence, we can start this transition on the computer screen from the presentation application to the research application by allowing the user to annotate as s/he reads. In Pliny, as you can see here, I aimed to enable digital annotations to work in some ways like they do on paper. In particular, they take up space on the digital page surface, and can take advantage of the 2D potential for page layout, the same way that writing in a book can do. This “first annotation/note taking phase” of the research process is also, then, clear enough and in many ways echoes what happens on paper. But Pliny operates in a context where we can now think about what happens after these annotations have been made. How can the computer help the Pliny user in the job of developing an interpretation, a new synthesis perhaps, for this and other materials that s/he has read? Pliny, then, presents us with a chance to think about what this kind of personal scholarly annotation is for, and how software can facilitate this use of these notes. So, what are these personal annotations for? As I’ve said earlier, just attaching annotations to a page like this leaves the annotator a bit stranded. Our researcher can only see an annotation when she looks at the page to which it is attached. After many annotations have been added, the job of the annotation as a note – to facilitate rememoration of the idea the note represents for later use is very limited if the note is tied to this page alone. It is what happens to the note after it has been made that matters if the note itself is to be effective. The issue is one of rememoration of the note at a later stage in the research. The question, then, is one of context: the note has to appear at the right time – when the researcher is working on an issue for which these notes are relevant. How can this be done? The need to recall notes in other contexts have been recognised by some tools. Some, for instance, allow notes to be categorised in a hierarchical system. After a note is filed in such a system the user will recall the note simply by scanning the hierarchy they have created, and observing that the note is there. For various reasons that are outside the scope of my current paper, I don’t believe that an informal hierarchical taxonomy approach of the kind that these environments support is satisfactory for the work of developing a personal interpretation of a body of materials. Thus, Pliny instead allows notes (or many other things) to be more generally recontextualised in any number of different contexts. Let’s take a look at a tiny example. I used Pliny to help me organise my ideas for this presentation. As I worked on this material I knew there was material in Anne Blair’s work that was relevant, and I noticed this note that I had put in this article by Anne Blair – the one pointed at with the red arrow.
- Meanwhile, while preparing for this presentation I knew that I wanted to think about Scholarship and Annotation. So I created a space in Pliny called this to support my thinking about it, and having got this space set up I began to assemble relevant materials in it. While doing this I realised that my thought about Blair’s article that I highlighted a second ago was useful in this context, so I put a reference to the note I had originally made in the Blair article here as well (You can see the reference to the same note in this new context – here appearing as a perspective on the question of what personal notetaking is about.) In fact, as you can see, I put the Blair note with a bunch of other notes that I had made at various times in the past and that all, it seemed to me, had a bearing on the issue of Scholarship and Annotation. You can see references to them here too. All these materials have been brought together and then organised to remind me about the issues that I wanted to explore that were related to the issue of Scholarship and Annotation. As you can see here, 2D space is one of the organising mechanism in Pliny that a researcher can use. In fact, a researcher often creates a whole set of interrelated spaces to support the exploring of ideas that they are interested in. A Pliny user creates and maintains these spaces, and through this work ideas are first captured and then developed as they emerge. By putting references to relevant notes in the spaces, and working to organise them, the user is encouraged to recall the notes themselves, and to figure out relationship between them that relate to their subject space. Why 2D space for this task of exploring and developing interesting concepts? It is important to recognise that ideas and constructs only emerge over time. To support this gradual development from vagueness to more clarity, it turns out to be useful to allow each area to be managed spatially, and to allow the user to group objects (into, say, subtopics) in the space. As you can see here, one can also draw lines between these objects to specify a connection between them. Each idea space, then, can be referred to later to remind the Pliny user about what materials are relevant to the idea space and to help the user to explore how they might interact with each other.
- Again, there is no time to talk in any detail about this now, but the Pliny way of handling annotations allows references to annotations and notes to interact in ways that fit together with the “Mind Map” model that has been often given as a rudimentary way to understand how humans connect things of interest in their heads.
- This figure suggests the way in which Pliny supports the “research application” which starts with annotation by helping the researcher to develop an interpretation for the materials that s/he is interested in. It is a schematic showing how, through the use of Pliny, users can annotate objects, and then use those annotations to further their thinking about topics that interest them. In the “Pliny model of research”, there are two phases following reading: The taking of materials one is working with and developing an interpretation of that material. In this “Interpreting phase” we see two Pliny “spaces” – one of them identified as the “Scholarship and Annotation” space we were just looking at. When there are interesting interpretations created (probably more than just two, as we see here), one can write about them, and can use Pliny to help with the writing process as well. So, here is the box representing the Pliny space called “Scholarship and Annotation” that we were just looking at (although simplified in this diagram). Here is the box representing the pages of Blair’s article where the annotation was first put. Note the arrow (highlighted in red) between our annotation in Blair and the reuse of the same note in “Scholarship and Annotation”. This line is meant to show that the same note appears in both places. It has been “re-contextualised” from being just a note in the Blair article, into also being a note that appears in the interpretation space I developed for “Scholarship and Annotation”. It can readily appear in other contexts too if that seems appropriate. Pliny’s Interpretation and Writing spaces are, then, a part of Pliny’s perspective of what the research application that follows after annotation would be like. Of course, they are not the research application itself – that happens in the mind of the user. However, they support the user while s/he works to develop his/her ideas, and through this support develop a representation of the researcher’s materials and ideas that capture some of the significance of them.
- Now, I hear some of you – perhaps those who work perhaps in areas such as text mining, or social network analysis – saying: this is all very nice, but in the contemporary DH world, not all materials a digital humanist works with comes from reading of books, yet all we have seen are examples of book (or digital book) annotation. How does this all this Pliny stuff fit with the more varied source of ideas that these new technologies represent? Well, the Pliny model, with its recognition of presentation applications such as PDF views as only one of possibly many, also accommodates the idea that a scholar might draw information from sources other than primary or secondary written ones. Here, my diagram has been expanded to include the use of software analysis tools. The data for these tools comes from the “data” area of what I have called, very generally, primary sources, but it is then interpreted by analysis software, such as that for, say, topic analysis, or SNA into presentations that provide displays such as visualisations that are meant to help the user grasp their dataset. I think that annotation operates here as well. The user will be exploring materials in new ways quite different from reading – but after looking at various visualisations that her software can create to help analyse the data, the way that s/he gets this into his/her thinking operates in a way similar to how reading does: something strikes his/her fancy, and she needs to respond to that in some way. Annotation, to capture the moment when the interesting observation happens, seems like the right approach for data displays from software as well.
- Here is a mockup of annotation in this context. Here, some software has produced a plot of a group of words into a two dimensional space. The technique used was correspondence analysis, a kind of multi-variate analysis technique, which was applied here against some word data for a text: in this case, Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. We can see annotation operating here. Having viewed the display the software has produced, the viewer has added annotations to this image which records his/her response to it. The “nexus” concept is still relevant too: the display generated by the software, plus the annotations that are displayed with it, acts as the nexus between the data being explored and presented and the user’s thoughts that come from it.
- Indeed, annotation might not only apply to the results of a data analysis like the graph we just saw. Here we have mocked up here a proposed environment that controls the processes that allowed the text to be subjected to Correspondence Analysis and created the screen we just were looking at – a graph called a data flow diagram. As the user creates the process s/he wants the computer to follow, perhaps s/he has thoughts about it. So, while the user has, in our mockup, defined the process for the computer in this way, s/he has also used annotation as a way to comment about the process as a whole by adding annotations to the process diagram.
- The idea that annotation is useful to think about not only against classic humanities materials such as primary and secondary textual sources, but against other ways to present materials too is called in the Pliny project “annotating everything”, and captures the event that happens when one moves from working with materials in many different forms, from printed text to graphical displays, to video or audio files, to integrating what the data shows into your own ideas and interests.
- In the end, then, as exemplified by Pliny, annotations provide the glue in scholarly work that connects the ideas and issues developed by its user and stored, in part at least, in Pliny’s data structure, with sources of various kinds. The sources include conventional things like documents – primary or secondary – and web pages, but also can include observations that come from visualisations or other digital processes and displays. In this representation, the green area in the middle is a place where digital representation of ideas that the researcher is exploring are represented. The Pliny model uses a 2D spatial approach to support the researcher in his/her explorations – but perhaps other richer or better models might be proposed for this. Regardless of exactly how the research application is supported by the software, the important thing to see about annotations is that they – here shown as yellow boxes, act as connections between these ideas the researcher is developing in the green space, and the sources of aspects of them in the documents, in the software displays, in the bits of video, etc, etc, that a digital environment can create. The annotations connect these sources to some kind of representation of ideas that emerge in the user’s mind. How does the creation of research output – shown at the bottom of this slide – fit with this? Well, the Pliny user can certainly use the spaces s/he has created to provide information and guidance for writing a research output paper. Also, in some recent work in the Pliny project my associate Michele Pasin and I have explored how Pliny data can be exported as RDF. Pliny’s annotations (the yellow boxes here) can be represented in a form that conforms to the W3C’s OA standard. The material Pliny has about the concept spaces the user has created can also, broadly speaking, be represented as RDF too, although the problem with the export of the spatial data is that it isn’t clear to us what one can usefully do with the RDF that is generated. Perhaps, there is more to say about this another time. Those interested can see something about our thinking about this in the draft article by myself and Michele Pasin entitled “Fitting Personal Interpretations with the Semantic Web”, which you can find online in the Pliny website. One more general point here should be made. The green area should remind us, that work by the human scholar needs to be done between the making of annotations and their publication. This is a part of the problem with annotation tools that focus only on public presentation of annotations. It is probably true that a scholar can make use of an annotation tool that enable the attaching of an annotation to an object and its more or less immediate publication – the uses are obvious and significant in teaching, say, or perhaps in places where the scholar is acting in a public sphere – comments on, say, government documents where s/he has expertise. However, by themselves, they are of limited use to a scholarly research process.
- So, in summary: Scholarship is a complex process – doubtless too complex to be properly categorized by my little diagram. However, one thing I think this figure can usefully remind us about is that, like in all academic disciplines, the important things that produce research results go on in the mind of a field’s practitioners. Annotation and notetaking, although doubtless not the only way in which a practitioner acquires understanding of his/her materials, plays an important role in the practice of many scholars. Their function is to capture a reaction to the material being worked with so that it can be later used in the researcher’s thinking: Blair’s “rememoration” process.
- The major problem the scholar has is keeping track of all his material. This is where the “nexus” model of annotation is relevant – the recognition that the spot – here a page – where the annotation is made marks the connection between two processes or applications that are going on. Here, the presentation of the printed page represents a culmination of the publishing process. However, the annotations – with their marked differences in character from the printed material represent the beginning of their contribution to a research process. Tools, then, no matter how sophisticated they are in their presentation of annotations, are of limited use to scholarship if they don’t, in some way or other, represent this nexus character that annotation for scholarship represents. If they focus only on annotation as an endpoint in their vision, they leave a researcher – using notetaking and annotation to struggle with the material upon which his/her research is based – stuck with limited means to exploit these annotations as his/her interpretation grows.
- So, a part of the way in which an annotation system can assist in the “rememoration” process is to contain software components that help the researcher in the task of keeping track and organising his/her annotations so that they fit into and support his/her interpretation. Pliny has tools to support this work. Here we see the screen shot of a space the Pliny user can create about a theme in the emerging interpretation. Notes, and other resources, can be assembled here and gradually organised as the user’s understanding of the issues and subthemes in this particular category emerges in his/her thinking. Although I can show this screen from Pliny, it is of course quite possible that other models, perhaps more sophisticated, might well do the job better than Pliny’s does. Simpler models, on the other hand, such as those based on some sort of hierarchical theme structure seem to me – for reasons outside the scope of this paper – to be too simplistic, however.
- In the end, then, annotation for scholarly research, acts as a kind of glue between different objects being studied in the research and interpretation which is shown here as happening in the green area. It is my view, at least, until digital annotation is fitted properly into a conceptual model that if it is not exactly this is at least something like it – something which fits well with how research is actually done in the humanities – annotation tools will be able to make little progress in connecting themselves with humanities scholarship.
- Thank you!
- Any questions or comments?