This document provides an overview of how the Annotation Studio software can be used in literature classrooms to enhance student learning and engagement. It describes several potential assignments involving close reading, developing arguments, research, and reflecting on the reading process. Students would annotate literary texts in the software to engage in activities like observing details, revising ideas, having discussions, and providing peer feedback. The document also outlines future directions for incorporating more student-generated materials and connecting the software to other digital resources and projects.

1. Kurt Fendt
hyperstudio.mit.edu
@MIThyperstudio

2. Digital Humanities - A Definition
• The digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, is a
field of research, teaching, and invention concerned with the
intersection of computing and the disciplines of the
humanities.
• It is methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope.
• It involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation
of information in electronic form.
• It studies how these media affect the disciplines in which they
are used, and what these disciplines have to contribute to our
knowledge of computing.
Wikipedia, s.v. „Digital Humanities“, last modified July 31, 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities

4. Research
Education
HyperStudio
Digital Technologies

5. Key Principles
• Pedagogical and/or scholarly needs drive
development
• Co-design with faculty, students, and other
partners
• Agile development with integrated feedback
• Students as novice scholars
• Engage learners in process of discovery,
interpretation, and collaboration
• Rethinking of pedagogical concepts and roles

6. Comédie-Française
Registers Project

8. Comédie-Française Registers Project
• Analysis of cultural data to gain insights into
cultural production
• Crowd-sourced data generation
• Audience: Theater scholars and graduate students
• Collaborations with the archive of the Comédie-
Française and scholars at a variety of French and
international universities

14. Berliner sehen

17. StudioTalks
Conversations
Workshops

18. Team

19. Annotation Studio
Ayse Gursoy, Research Assistant
Jason Lipshin, Research Assistant
hyperstudio.mit.edu

20. Talmud

21. Iliad: Venetus, 10th century

23. Pedagogical Approach
• Increase awareness of fluid processes of reading,
writing, borrowing, and revision
• Engage students as “editors”
• Develop traditional humanistic skills (close reading,
textual analysis, persuasive writing, critical thinking)
• Allow students to practice “scholarly primitives”
hyperstudio.mit.edu

24. 6

25. Future Directions
• Side-by-side display of texts
• Annotation across multiple texts
• Robust filtering of tags and search capabilities
• Annotation of multimedia sources (image, video,
audio)
• Customizable visual display of annotations
• Curated repository of media and text documents
hyperstudio.mit.edu

26. Funding & Team
Funding:
Miximize: Alumni Class Fund, SHASS Teaching and Learning Grant
(both MIT)
Annotation Studio: NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant
Team:
Kurt Fendt, Jim Paradis, Wyn Kelley, Jamie Folsom, David Della Costa,
Nimble Partners, Ayse Gursoy, Jia Zhang, Jason Lipshin, Teri Oehmke
hyperstudio.mit.edu

27. Using Annotation Studio in the
Literature Classroom
Wyn Kelley
wkelley@mit.edu

28. Miximize Pedagogy:
Visualizing Reading and Writing
 Texts and sources
 Close reading
 Students as editors
 Social reading
 student audience
 peer review

29. Annotation Across Classroom Practices:
Choose One or More
 Close Reading
 Revision
 Developing an Argument
 Research and Presentation
 Making Connections Across Texts
 Peer Review and Social Reading
 Reflecting on the Processes of Reading, Writing, and Sharing
Work

30. Assignments: Writing About Literature
 Close reading of a single chapter in Frankenstein
 Study of one of Mary Shelley’s sources (research
workshop, report, and essay)
 Comparison of characters in Melville’s Benito Cereno
and Amasa Delano’s Narrative
Last essay, using contemporary works (Wilde’s Earnest
with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home) reflects on thematic
comparison and the reading process.

31. Observation Into Argument
 It's funny how he's complaining about his pains because when a
female gives birth she actually has physical pains. In contrast
though, Frankentstein was in "labor" for twice as long as your
typical female.Yet somehow his creature was still an ugly
disappointment.
 Clerval can be a Hercules.
 Why is a mummy not as bad as the monster? A mummy was
once alive and mummified dead. The monster was never alive to
begin with. He is brought to life from unnatural beginnings.
 Victor's state of mind is so bad he is delusional and thinks the
monster is there in the room. This is his suffering like
Prometheus.
 THIS IS NOT TYPICAL OF A MAN OF SCIENCE!

32. Assignments: Reading Fiction
 Reading Objects in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
 Reading the Body in Melville’s Benito Cereno
 Reading Sources in Bronte’s Jane Eyre or Joyce’s Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man (research workshop, report,
essay)
Final essay, looking at Morrison’s Jazz and Diaz’s The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, reflects on reading in
contemporary social communities

33. Revision: Developing an Argument
 Captain Delano believes exactly what he sees; he believes the body an
exact expression of the mind.
 Uh oh. Keeping track of lies is tough, isn't it?
 Well played, Babo. He has shown himself to be powerless yet again,
when he is actually the ringleader of the whole operation.
 I think the use of "clamorous" here is interesting. It’s also the first sign
that something is amiss that Delano ignores. Why are blacks and the
whites intermingling on the ship so much instead of being separated?
 The turban, "salaam," and "rajah-looking" descriptors make him seem of
South Asian ethnicity, but we can take it as a fact that he is a mulatto
—"a person of mixed white and black ancestry"
(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mulatto)

34. Future Potential
 Pedagogy
 Incorporating student-generated texts for annotation
 Developing citation tools
 Filtering annotations by student, subject, date, etc.
 Working with MIT Libraries to digitize texts and materials in
Annotation Studio
 Research
 Mapping Moby-Dick (with Melville Electronic Library)
 Literary Timelines

35.  With Thanks
 Alumni Class Funds and SHASS Teaching and
Learning Funds
 Literature
 HyperStudio/CMS