Annotations in Scholarly Editions and Research

Functions, Differentiation, Systematization

Julia Nantke, Frederik Schlupkothen, Julia Nantke, Frederik Schlupkothen

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783110689174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The term 'annotation' is associated in the Humanities and Technical Sciences with different concepts that vary in coverage, application and direction but which also have instructive parallels. This publication mirrors the increasing cooperation that has been taking place between the two disciplines within the scope of the digitalization of the Humanities. It presents the results of an international conference on the concept of annotation that took place at the University of Wuppertal in February 2019. This publication reflects on different practices and associated concepts of annotation in an interdisciplinary perspective, puts them in relation to each other and attempts to systematize their commonalities and divergences.

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An Online Field Study on Scholarly Journal Annotations

Empirical Evidence and Implications for Software Design in the Digital Humanities

Felix Lange

Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte

Abstract

Even though there is an abundance of web-based annotation tools that allow users to share their data across the internet, little is known about how these tools are actually used in the daily work routines of scholars in the Humanities. This chapter presents an empirical study on public inline annotations by publishers, article authors and readers in a scholarly open-access journal. The findings of this study are combined with a meta-analysis of the existing empirical literature on marginal annotations in the Humanities and scholars’ willingness to share them. The most important conclusion that can be drawn from the empirical data is that the publication of annotations is not a feature that needs to be offered by all types of scholarly annotation software packages.

keywords: Collaboration, Evaluation, Classifying, Commenting, Form, Tool, Digital Humanities,

1 Introduction

In his contribution to this volume, Willard McCarty describes his personal way of writing, storing and processing notes on scholarly texts. An early step in this workflow is to „record ideas, keywords and references to other sources I want to come back to later for more detailed note-making“ on separate paper slips (McCarty 2020, 276 ff.). Two aspects of this description, the temporary, transient nature of preliminary comments and the working context in which they are made, can also be taken as distinctive features of individual scholarly annotations written in the margins of texts, henceforth marginalia (cf. Bold and Wagstaff 2017). It has been shown that these textual notes, consisting of a couple of sentences or even only some symbols, have been an important element of academic reading throughout the ages (Agosti et al. 2007; Blair 2004). Less clear is the relationship between this text genre and the scholarly practices of communication and data sharing. In the Digital Humanities (DH), which set out to foster collaboration and information sharing, there have been numerous initiatives to provide the means to share or publish this type of data. Connecting primary sources, scholarly literature and annotations on these texts could result in a “Scholarly Web” (Perkel 2015) that crosses the boundaries of disciplines and links once isolated digital collections (Lordick 2015, 2). The individual work of text analysis might be opened up to larger audiences even in the early stages of research (Becker et al. 2016, 10). These ideas are taken to the extreme by Hemminger and TerMaat (2014, 2278): “One can now foresee a time when every scholar’s thoughts about a particular article are electronically captured and displayed to other scholars.” This vision has already received considerable technological support: The “Web Annotation Data Model” (henceforth WADM) issued by the W3C¹ provides interoperability across software and collections (Hunter et al. 2010), and a number of DH tools ofer annotation-sharing capabilities (Müller-Birn et al. 2015, Grassi et al. 2013²). At present, though, it is unclear if a Scholarly Web of annotations will come into existence. For other types of annotations such as linguistic tags, established infrastructures for the publication of annotated data exist and are in constant use,³ but so far no comparable platform has attracted a large number of textual free-form annotations. It seems safe to say that the web-scale publication⁴ of marginalia has not become a regular feature of scholarly work in the Humanities so far. The question arises as to whether it should be a feature of annotation environments at all. After all, there have been a number of reports of a general mismatch between user needs and software designs in the Digital Humanities (Juola 2008, 75; Pape et al. 2012, 3 f.). This potential mismatch could reflect a general problem with annotation tools. An annotation feature was devised for one of the first graphical web browsers in the early 1990s (Carpenter 2013), and later Adriano and Ricarte (2012) were able to list eighty diferent systems in a comparative study of general-purpose annotation software tools. In the (now defunct) DH tool directory DiRT, “Annotation” was among the three functions that were referred to most often (Borek et al. 2016, Par. 9). But web annotation was not included as a feature of later browser generations, whose present-day descendants still do not conform to the WADM (Shaikh-Lesko 2019), and so far no killer application (cf. Juola 2008) has been presented for web-based digital annotations. It seems clear that more research is needed on the real potential for annotation-sharing within and outside academia. In light of these problems, this chapter follows Antonijević Ubois’ (2016) maxim of “Developing Research Tools via Voices from the Field”, gathering empirical evidence on scholarly annotation practices in order to derive ideas for software design. It presents the findings of a study on public inline annotations authored by publishers, article authors and readers in the open-access journal eLife.⁵ The findings of this study are combined with a meta-analysis of the existing empirical literature on marginalia in the Humanities and scholars’ willingness to share them.

The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 offers an overview and a categorization of annotation systems in the Digital Humanities. Section 3 reviews the existing literature on annotations, and Section 4 presents new data on public scholarly annotations. Sections 5 and 6 set out the findings and derive recommendations for software design.

2 Annotations in the Digital Humanities: Concepts and Systems

At least since the 1990s, shared digital annotation environments have been an active field of study, both within the Digital Humanities and in Computer and Information Sciences (e.g. Ovsiannikov et al. 1999) in general. However, the types of annotations discussed range from marginalia written for private use to digital editions and linguistic markup in text corpora (Hunter 2009, 1). Annotations of the latter two types constitute research findings that are published together with their respective annotation targets (i.e. the objects that annotations are attached to). It is clear that publishing these annotations is normally useful or even necessary. Therefore, annotations need to be categorized to distinguish between different degrees of a priori suitability for publication. However, there is no consensus in the literature on a useful typology of digital annotations. In his influential work on “Scholarly Primitives”, Unsworth (2000, 1) counted the practice of annotating among the “basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines”. In a similar manner, the “Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities” project (TaDiRAH, Borek et al. 2016), which draws on Unsworth’s work, does not subcategorize “Annotating” any further, but subsumes the practices of “adding, e.g., comments, metadata or keywords”⁶ under the entry. In this taxonomy, annotating is a subtype of “Enrichment”, as it makes information inherent to the annotation target explicit. Annotating is explicitly contrasted with “Commenting” (a subtype of “Dissemination”), an activity that “serves to express some opinion, to add contextual information, or to engage in communication or collaboration.⁷”If these definitions are used to inform software design one-to-one, annotating has to be modeled as one function, and commenting as another. But the distinction between “contextual information” and information which is “inherent” to the annotation target is too subtle for that purpose. Furthermore, there are conceptual doubts about whether a clearcut distinction between the two activities is empirically adequate: Walkowski (2016b, 9 f.) notes that in practice, annotating is most often part of other research activities. And with respect to annotating as a “Primitive”, Unsworth later considered the possibility that some of the initial categories might have to be further subcategorized (Unsworth and Tupman 2016, 232). Indeed, it can be shown that a more fine-grained subcategorization of annotating practices is helpful in constructing suitable use cases and, accordingly, functional requirements for software design. The factors presented in Table 1, which have in part been derived from Hunter’s comprehensive typology (Hunter 2009, 4–14), form the basis for a tentative subcategorization of annotations and the software systems with which they can be produced.

Tab. 1:Annotation dimensions

Category	Annotation Author/Reader Scope	Target Type	Annotation Target Granularity	Metadata Depth
Values	1: Individual	1: Research	1: Publication/File	1: Technical/Application-
	2: Collaboratory	Literature	2: Part of	Specific
	3: (Scholary)	2: Primary	Publication/File	2: Ad-hoc Semantics
	Public	Source		3: Std.-Conformant Metadata (WADM)
				4: LOD (Target, Body)

This choice of features is motivated as follows. Author scope and reader scope⁸ indicate whether annotation authoring must be a function presented to all annotation readers, or if writing and reading functions can be facilitated by different software modules and interfaces. “Collaboratories” are defined in Cerf et al. (1993, 7 f., cf. Agosti et al. 2004) as networked infrastructures enabling scientific collaboration. They differ from solitary working contexts in that they require networked software for shared annotations. In contrast to web-scale annotations, however, sharing...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction Annotations in Scholarly Editions and Research
• „Aha!“ – Annotieren mit Stiften als epistemische Praxis
• The Multimodal Annotation of Gender Differences in Contemporary TV Series Combining Qualitative Questions and Quantitative Results
• Ein Schema für das Schreiben Musils Nachlass als Modell
• Annotationen als Instrument der Strukturierung
• Footnotes (as Annotations) in Historical Context and Their Relevance for Digital Humanities in Our Time
• ‚Annotationsspiralen‘ und ‚hermeneutischer Zirkel‘? Eine epistemologische Annäherung an die Interdependenzen zwischen Benennungs-, Modellierungs- und Erkenntnisprozessen in der (Re-)Konstruktion von Topoi
• Undogmatic Literary Annotation with CATMA Manual, Semi-Automatic and Automated
• Facilitating Reusable Third-Party Annotations in Digital Editions
• Digitale Annotation alchemischer Decknamen „Die Allegoriae werden uns nit mehr verborgen seyn.“
• An Online Field Study on Scholarly Journal Annotations Empirical Evidence and Implications for Software Design in the Digital Humanities
• Beispiele annotieren Zwischen interpretativer Arbeit am philosophischen Text, Formalisierung und maschinellen Verfahren
• Making and Studying Notes Towards a Cognitive Ecology of Annotation
• Observations on Annotations
• Die Erstellung von Annotationsrichtlinien als Community-Aufgabe für die Digitalen Geisteswissenschaften Ein Vorschlag zu Shared Tasks in den Digital Humanities
• ‘Commentary’ and ‘Explanatory Note’ in Editorial Studies and Digital Publishing
• A ‘Reversible Figure Annotation System’ for the Born-Digital Critical Edition of d’Holbach’s Complete Works
• List of Contributors
• Index