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1/19/2017 Skills and Strategies | Annotating to Engage, Analyze, Connect and Create - The New York Times
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Skills and Strategies | Annotating to Engage,Analyze, Connect and CreateBy Jeremy Dean and Katherine Schulten November 12, 2015 4:40 pm
What do your students think annotation looks like? For many, it probablybegins and ends with the image of an assigned novel bristling with yellow Post-its.
But to annotate simply means to add a note to a text — whether marginalia in abook, or a comment on Facebook or YouTube. Even if they don’t realize they’redoing it, young people are annotating constantly as a natural way of engaging withthe world.
In this post we hope to both expand their definition of what annotation can beand inspire them to experiment with new ways of doing it — in class and out.
What Does It Mean to Annotate? Expanding the Definition
An annotation is a note added to a book, drawing or any other kind of text as acomment or explanation. It is an age-old learning practice, older than booksthemselves, one used by medieval scribes in the very process of transcription.
For many, it is a natural extension of reading. As Sam Anderson puts it in a 2011essay for The Times Magazine, his college habit of making notes in the margins ofbooks “quickly began to feel, for me, like something more intense: a way to not justpassively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with anauthor on some kind of primary textual plane.”
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For teachers, it can be a technique to slow readers down, deepen their
engagement and aid in comprehension and analysis, skills few need to be convinced
matter in the era of the Common Core. For students, though, that exercise can
sometimes feel artificial.
Yet annotation is something we all do all the time and can include everything
from footnotes to criticism, graffiti to fan fiction. What is social media but spaces
where people annotate texts and images, the digital margins of our daily lives?
Sam Anderson writes:
We are living increasingly in a culture of response. Twitter is basically
electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions.
The best parallel in critical writing might be online episode recaps of TV
shows: a viewer rolling around in a work of art, noticing it deeply, not just
(as critics too often do) resorting to distant acts of intellection. Marginalia is
literature’s TV recap, although even more satisfying: real-time commentary
happening in the core of the thing being commented upon.
On NYTimes.com and on The Learning Network, thousands of comments, or
annotations, are posted by readers daily on issues from free speech on college
campuses to drone racing. All comments are moderated, and the system allows both
readers and Times journalists to reply to and “recommend” them.
Annotation in academic settings is typically considered a means to an end, a
basis for class discussion or points made in a final paper. But annotation can also be
a kind of end in itself, or at least more than a rest stop on the way to intellectual
discovery. This becomes especially true when annotation is brought into the public
and collaborative space of social reading online, and students can see their
classmates’ comments alongside their own.
And with recent innovations in web annotation like the ability to add
multimedia marginalia like that in the image at the top of this post (done by Jeremy
Dean’s students at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, Tex.), the process of
annotation can feel more fun and engaging than dutiful.
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Several years ago, the website Genius (formerly Rap Genius) was established toannotate music lyrics hosted on its platform. It’s proven to be something youngpeople happily do on their own, discussing the word choices and poetic devices usedby their favorite musicians in the same way their teachers ask them to discuss greatworks of literature in class.
For example, hundreds of users recently contributed annotations to KendrickLamar’s lyrics for the song “The Blacker the Berry,” and over a million and a halfpeople have viewed that annotated text. In all likelihood, most of these readers andannotators were young people of high school and college age, though it’s true thatthe Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon also added an annotation to thefinal couplet of the track.
Genius is now adding a growing list of nonmusical texts to its website —including many classic literary texts like the Langston Hughes poem at the top ofthis post — and has also developed a plugin for users to use in annotating otherwebsites.
Ask your students how many kinds of annotation they can find — around theWeb and out in the world. Then create a kind of “annotation gallery” of possibilitiesto inspire their own work.
For instance, here are just a few from The Times:
— The series Anatomy of a Scene invites film directors to comment on their ownwork. Here, Ava DuVernay narrates a sequence from “Selma”:
— Crowdsourced graphics like this 2014 series of maps, “Your Biking Wisdom inTen Words,” take user annotations to create something both useful and welldesigned. This article explains.
— On the Learning Network, our most popular form of annotation is our weeklyWhat’s Going On in This Picture? discussion, in which hundreds of students discusswhat they see in a captionless photo. A moderator from Visual Thinking Strategiesengages with them live, and the “backstory” about the photo is posted several dayslater.
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Here, for instance, is a screenshot from a recent discussion:
Why Digital Annotation, and How Do I Do It?
Digital annotation is close reading 2.0. Through the visualization of the process
of highlighting and noting words, phrases and sentences, students are forced to keep
their thinking and writing “close” to the text and its evidence. And, when done with
others, students can create what feels like a social network for close reading — a way
of working many find much more engaging than individual analog annotation.
There are a variety of tools out there that allow you to annotate digital texts
collaboratively. Most of us have probably done this in Word or Google Docs. There
are far fewer tools that allow you to annotate the actual web, where annotations are
linked to specific text at specific web addresses like “learning.blogs.nytimes.com/”.
Genius’s Web Annotator is one of them. By installing Genius’s browser
extension, you and your students can annotate any page on the Internet, though all
annotations must be public.
Diigo is another tool for annotating the web, but with a decidedly more
educational focus, including the ability to annotate in private groups. Diigo has
number of other tools in addition to annotation that might be attractive to students
and teachers, such as an outlining tool. While student and teacher accounts at Diigo
are free, their features are limited and the service is ultimately based on a
subscription model.
A third option is the free web annotation tool developed by the nonprofit
Hypothesis. It shares much of the same functionality as Genius and Diigo — it’s
predominantly a browser extension, and it too offers private groups — but unlike the
other two, it is both open source and, like the web itself, based on open standards. It
also has an education department focused on supporting teachers and students
using the service.
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Eight Ways to Experiment With Annotation Using The New YorkTimes
Each of the ideas below can be done individually or collaboratively; on paper ordigitally; and on their own or with other annotation strategies.
Though all of them allow an instructor to weigh in and pose questions, theteacher’s role here is as co-learner in the reading process, observing and coachingstudent thinking on the side.
Annotation to Wrestle With and React to a Text
This is the broadest and probably most familiar form of annotation for students— the kind of conversation with a text that readers have been having as long asbooks have existed.
#ANNOTATE the entire internet with @Genius. Our new
@Genius billboard is on Canal & Centre St. in NYC
#BABYCORE
12:23 PM - 9 Feb 2015
26 39
Genius @Genius
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It’s the marginalia Sam Anderson writes about in his essay and exhibits in “AView From the Margins,” his series of audio recordings on 12 months of reading, andannotating, everything from “1Q84″ by Haruki Murakami to “Bleak House” byCharles Dickens (the latter of which, he says, inspired “my most explosive LOL in myentire year of reading”).
The Learning Network has an entire lesson plan devoted to doing it the old-fashioned, analog way — but if you’d like to experiment with doing it digitally, youmight look at what Sarah Gross, a high school teacher and contributor to our blog,did recently using Hypothesis with her senior class as they read the Opinion piece“What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech.”
Click on the highlighted words and sentences to see how she and her studentsposed questions and responded to them, added personal reactions, madeconnections and replied to one another. You can see that it feels very much likesitting in on a class discussion. This is one of the primary benefits of collaborativeannotation in the classroom: Students engage texts and one another before meetingface to face, making that meeting all the more energetic and productive.
For another example, check out how Grant Schubert, a composition teacher atRock Valley College, prompts his students to comment on The Times’s recent piece,“The Lonely Death of George Bell.” As he writes, “Act like you are scribbling in themargins of your favorite book, but this time your whole class and a weirdly energeticteacher gets to read your notes.”
In both examples, you’ll see that an annotation need not be, and often is not, ananswer. A simple question mark can flag a word or passage for discussion, forinstance. Directing students to annotate in this way creates a sort of heat map for theinstructor that can be used to zero in on troubling sections and subjects or initiateclass discussion. And while the teacher can respond to such student annotations, apossible follow-up exercise could involve students responding to one anotherinstead.
Here are some things students can do as they annotate — many of which wetake on in greater depth in the other exercises below:
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Circle unfamiliar words or references.
Mark passages with symbols like question or exclamation marks.
Highlight important lines or sections.
Connect parts of the text to other parts with arrows.
Note emotional reactions.
Post questions.
Make connections to other texts or to their own lives.
Summarize difficult concepts.
Add related images.
Add links to related information.
Note how the piece is structured, or how the author uses language in interesting
ways.
React to the content over all.
Note patterns, themes and motifs.
Annotating Current Events to Add Context and Enrich BackgroundKnowledge
To read a daily newspaper and understand reporting about continuing stories —
whether the Islamic State, the 2016 presidential race, the migration crisis in Europe
or racial tensions on college campuses — often requires background knowledge
students don’t have.
Though The Times and other news sources are increasingly publishing
“explainers” that offer a bigger picture (like this one, on the Islamic State), showing
students how to do this kind of glossing for themselves and one another teaches
them a skill they can use for the rest of their lives. There is something very powerful
about seeing students begin to imagine themselves as scholars, responsible for
guiding a real audience through a text, whether their own peers or a broader
intellectual community.
A 2012 Learning Network lesson plan, Easy Access: Creating Annotated
Versions of News Articles, details ideas for having students try this, whether alone or
in collaboration with others — although collaboratively is perhaps the better choice
since they can share the burden of research.
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Throughout, students can also be encouraged to practice skills like rephrasingresearch material appropriately and citing sources using different formatting styles.
For an example before they try it themselves, students might look at TheTimes’s annotation of Pope Francis’ September address to Congress, in whichreporters with expertise in different areas explain the context of many of the pope’sstatements.
When they’re ready, here are some of the kinds of annotations they might add:
Definitions for terms.Dates for events or documents.Maps or geographic references for events or locations.Historical and other background information for events mentioned.Statistics or demographics relevant to locations or groups.Biographical information for key players.Brief histories of groups or organizations mentioned.Explainers and informative graphics.Video clips, slide shows, photographs, charts and graphs.Related news articles and footage.
Annotating With Multimedia
One of the most powerful aspects of writing online is the ability to includeimages and other multimedia elements in one’s compositions. The screenshot at thevery top of this post shows a powerful example from Genius.com of studentscomposing analysis using both image and texts.
And, of course, as the front page of any day’s New York Times illustrates,newspapers rely on images just as much as they do on text to draw readers in.
Ask students to read an article and add images — photos, maps, illustrations,GIFs, graphics, videos — to help bring the story to life. This is also an opportunity toteach students about rules governing use of images, and editorial tasks likecaptioning and attribution.
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These images can simply be representative (a reference to Lincoln annotatedwith a photo of the 16th president, for example), but more advanced students mightalso think about how images themselves make arguments and serve other rhetoricalpurposes.
For help with this, you might try our lesson plan Making Arguments ThroughArt, which looks closely at the “Op-Art” found in The Times, such as this recentdrawing illustrating the Op-Ed columnist Frank Bruni’s October take on theRepublican presidential field:
Students can also use their imaginations to annotate texts with their owndrawings, photographs or videos in line with the relevant sources of textualinspiration. Whether completed individually or collaboratively, this exercise canresult in some wonderful illustrated editions of course texts. For inspiration, have alook at Nathan Blom’s Annotated Literature Projects at LaGuardia High School forthe Arts.
Jeb Bush is in big trouble. Ted Cruz lurks. What a chaotic,incendiary political season nyti.ms/1jlvRZD5:52 PM - 10 Oct 2015
18 15
NYT Opinion @nytopinion
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Annotation as Argument
Students are already very familiar with this kind of annotation, even if theydon’t realize it. They see it every day as they click around the web. It’s what DonaldTrump is doing in the video above, and it’s what they do when they post a review ofsomething on Yelp or Rotten Tomatoes, comment on an opinion someone expresseson Facebook or tweet a reaction to a news or sports event or TV show.
One place students can go to see a great deal of thoughtful argument: readercomments on Times articles. Often, in fact, the comments are as interesting as thearticle itself.
Have them choose a topic that interests them or about which they have strongopinions, then scroll through what other commenters have appended. For instance,here one reader pushes back on ideas in a piece by the comedian and actor AzizAnsari about acting, race and Hollywood:
Or, have students examine the Learning Network’s Student Opinion feature. Wepost a question every school day and invite students to comment on it — and haveeven rounded up 301 questions that invite argument writing.
For example, we recently asked, Should High Schools Drop Football BecauseToo Many Players Are Getting Injured? and Quinn B. answered. As you can see, fiveof his fellow commenters recommended what he had to say:
Next, you might invite students to move to more formal analysis of rhetoricalstrategies and fallacies by having them read and annotate Times Op-Ed pieces.Framing their opinions as annotations of specific statements or facts can remindthem that our arguments should be grounded in actual evidence. And allowingstudents to express their opinions in the margins of the web, and helping thembecome responsible and thoughtful as they do it, is a huge part of what it means tobe literate both on online and in democratic society generally.
Students could be asked simply to respond to the reading with their thoughts, asin a dialectical reading journal, or to employ specific cultural or persuasive strategies
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in their rhetorical intervention. For instance, they might annotate to identify the useof logos, ethos and pathos.
Annotation can also serve as a kind of “rehearsal space” for formal writing. Asyour students practice “talking back” to Opinion pieces in The Times, they mightconsider it preparation for their own argumentative essays, perhaps to submit to ourannual contest, which we’ll feature again in Feb., 2016.
As with all the ideas in this post, this can be done independently orcollaboratively. Done independently, students can compare their articles and discusshow different authors establish their authority or commit common fallacies. Focusedon a suite of articles relating to a specific topic, students might be asked to notepatterns of expression.
Another idea: Ask students to fact-check a claim made in an article. This can beespecially powerful in the case of political speeches or Op-Ed pieces. Annotationsshould be based on related research and should evaluate the truthfulness of theoriginal claim using predetermined criteria. Here is an example of how professionalpolitical reporters have done this at PolitiFact using the Genius annotation tool.Climatologists have also done this using Hypothesis to comment on popular newscoverage of climate change.
Annotating to Make Connections
In her essay “Reading Antarctica,” Kamila Shamsie writes about reading “MobyDick” while on a boat to Antarctica — and finding herself annotating as she went:
I never annotate novels; it seems odd to think anything I might write inthe margins could add to rather than detract from what is printed on thepage. But from the start, the echoes between what I was reading and what Iwas seeing around me seemed to ask for me to take note, quite literally.
While your students might not have at hand as dramatic a parallel between theirown experience and a text, annotating explicitly to make connections between what
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they’re reading and the rest of the world can help them see why particular texts
matter and are still relevant today.
We try to foster this kind of thinking on the blog in many ways — through our
Text to Text series and via this activity, for example. We love when readers do it
naturally, the way Sarah Gross’s students connect the article on women in tech to
other articles around the web, to the movie “The Imitation Game” and, as a student
named Jesse Doppelt did, to their own work — a project on sexism and the TV show
“The Big Bang Theory.”
Here are some ways students might annotate for making these kinds of
connections, via posting comments, links, images or anything else that makes each
connection clear:
Parts of the text that remind you of your own life and experiences, or those of
someone you know.
Parts of the text that are not at all like your own life and experiences, and why.
What you have read, seen or listened to that in some way reminds you of this topic
or aspects of it.
Ways in which this same topic is explored elsewhere, or in other formats.
Events, issues, people, places or things elsewhere in the world connected to this
topic or aspects of it.
Events, issues, people, places or things in history that seem connected to this
topic.
Annotation as Research Skill
This exercise offers a slightly different take on what it means to annotate.
Instead of having students note specific words and passages, they are, instead,
simply tagging a series of texts on a particular topic in order to collect, categorize
and organize them.
Direct students to find articles relating to a topic they will be researching. Some
web annotation tools like Hypothesis include a tagging or bookmarking feature that
can be used to organize research. For instance, a class at Washington State
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University Vancouver is currently collaboratively researching the topic of educationpolicy and has tagged its work ‘EduPol’.
If your students are researching, say, Shakespeare for a paper on “Hamlet,” theycould collect information on literary elements via tags like “setting,” “tone” or onthemes like “uncertainty,” as shown ikn this example used in the Hypothesis guidefor students.
To create a digital version of a traditional annotated bibliography from here,page-level annotations can be used to summarize the sources, and in-line annotationcan further break down and begin analyzing arguments. Using tagging andannotation in this way, teachers can follow along and engage students in theirresearch processes.
Annotating History
Invite students to annotate archival news reports about a major historical eventyou are studying. You might use our On This Day feature to find interesting front-page news, from the moon landing to the sinking of the Titanic, or use TimesMachine to page through copies of The Times from 1851 to 1980 as they originallyappeared.
Here, for example, is how students in Mark Sample’s Davidson College edXcourse on “Electronic Literature” revisited Robert Coover’s 1992 essay on hypertextin The New York Times Review of Books, using Hypothesis.
Some questions students might consider as they annotate:
How is this report, written at the time of the event, different from the historicalperspective about the event as explained in textbooks, encyclopedias andelsewhere?How is the contemporary coverage of the event different from how we understandthis event today in general?What is interesting about the style, language or structure of this report? Whatdoes it tell you about its time and place?
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For more ideas about bringing the past and present together through newspaper
archives, visit our lesson plans for the 100th anniversaries of the sinking of the
Titanic and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, or see our 2014-15 series Throwback
Thursday.
Free Annotation
After students have practiced digital annotation of various kinds alone and in
groups and become comfortable with the way a particular platform like Hypothesis
works, set them free to annotate whatever they like.
For instance, you can assign them to roam through The New York Times, or any
other newspaper, as part of an inquiry project, adding comments on the things that
interest them. And you can follow their work as they go. If you are using Hypothesis,
each user’s annotations are streamed on their public “My Annotations” page, and
teachers can monitor student work like a portfolio rather than on individual texts if
so desired. (You can click on a user name attached to an annotation or search the
Hypothesis stream for a user name to locate this page. Here, for instance, is Jeremy
Dean’s, and you can see he’s been annotating everything from a Times article on the
new Quentin Tarantino movie to a recent Supreme Court decision.)
Many of the exercises above presume that students are annotating together on a
shared course text. But the nature of web annotation is that we can see the notes of
others even if we are not reading the same text. In this way, we can attend to
annotations as texts themselves. Like scrolling through a friend’s Facebook page or
Twitter feed, seeing someone else navigate the world through annotation can be
compelling and edifying.
How do your students annotate? What experiments have you tried? Annotate
this piece yourself by posting a comment.
Jeremy Dean has taught English at both the college and high school levels. He
started the education initiative at Genius and is the current director of education at
Hypothesis.
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The authors of this post will be part of a panel presenting on “Annotating theWorld: Digital Tools for Close-Reading Nonfiction” at the N.C.T.E. convention onNov. 20.
Update: Here are the slides from our presentation, with work from The
Learning Network, Genius, Hypothesis, Vocabulary.com, and Sarah Gross, one of
the teachers whose work is featured in this post.
StandardsThis resource may be used to address the academic standards listed below.
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