jb dariah-annotation-workshop

Annotation and Scholarship:how might they connect in a digital context?

John Bradley(Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London)[email protected] DARIAH Workshop: Practices and Context in Contemporary Annotation Activitieshttp://www.bbaw.de/work-anno/

http://www.bbaw.de/work-anno/

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

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)

Wikipedia: Web Annotation

Web Annotation: features

[…]

About Hypothes.is

https://hypothes.is/about/


“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


Hypothes.is: Annotation for teaching

1. Teacher Annotations2. Annotation as Gloss3. Annotation as Question4. Annotation as Close Reading5. Annotation as Rhetorical Analysis6. Annotation as Opinion7. Annotation as Multimedia Writing8. Annotation as Independent Study9. Annotation as Annotated Bibliography10. Annotation as Creative Act

https://hypothes.is/blog/back-to-school-with-annotation-10-ways-to-annotate-with-students/


Web Annotation and its functions

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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

Taxonomy of Digital Research Activites in the Humanities

https://github.com/dhtaxonomy/TaDiRAH

https://github.com/dhtaxonomy/TaDiRAH

Annotation in TaDiRAH

Published Image Annotation in KCL’s “Art of Making” project

http://www.artofmaking.ac.uk/


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.

http://pliny.cch.kcl.ac.uk/

Primary sourcesEditions

Primary sourcesManuscripts, Art objects, other “data”

2ndary literature(interpretative)

Document-oriented view

The “idea cloud”




Ideas, concepts, arguments, debates(formally ill-defined)

Adding digital methods into the picture





SemanticWeb (?)

DigitalText(TEI)

Fitting the scholar in the picture





SemanticWeb (?)

DigitalText(TEI)

Personal(mind)

Finding annotation in the picture





SemanticWeb (?)

DigitalText(TEI)

Personal(mind)

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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.

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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>.

http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-01/reading.html%3E

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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

Humanities research as process, and its research output

Humanities Researchas process

SourceSecond’rySources

SourceSourcePrimarySources

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

“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

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

Thinking about Scholarship and Annotation

31

Pliny objects as a connected graph: a “Mind Map”

An example of a mindmap Graham Burnett (2005) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

File:Mindmap.gif

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Notes and the Interpretative and Writing Processes

Concept 1

Concept 2

“recontextualising”

Paper 1

Paper 2

Reading Interpreting Writing

Scholarship and …

Formsl elements …

Adding DH methodologies into the picture





SemanticWeb (?)

DigitalText(TEI)

Personal(mind)

AnalysisTool

(Software)

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

Annotating everything:process descriptions

Comments added by researcher while building the flow diagram

“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

Annotation as a kind of “glue” between applications

DocumentPage

PDF Viewer

Webpage

Browser

DocumentPage

PDF Viewer

CATMADisplay

CatmaWordHoard

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/fitting-Bradley-Pasin.pdf

http://pliny.cch.kcl.ac.uk/docs/fitting-Bradley-Pasin.pdf


Finding annotation in the picture





SemanticWeb (?)

DigitalText(TEI)

Personal(mind)

AnalysisTool

(Software)

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

Thinking about Scholarship and Annotation

41

Annotation as a kind of “glue”

DocumentPage

PDF Viewer

Webpage

Browser

DocumentPage

PDF Viewer

CATMADisplay

CatmaWordHoard

Display

WordHoard

Concept

Concept

Note

Concept

Pliny

?

RDF

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/





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://pliny.cch.kcl.ac.uk/