Annotation (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

by Remi H. Kalir

Annotation connects together people, texts, and ideas, enabling shared insight, engaged dialogue, and new understanding and knowledge.

Annotation, as we define and discuss, is the addition of a note to a text.

This book about annotation is an invitation to think through—and also write about—the many ways in which people add notes to texts for various personal and professional purposes.

annotation,

Annotation is a unique form of note taking in that it is contextualized. A note has a location in addition to whatever additional information it contains.

We’ll also introduce five annotation purposes: providing information, sharing commentary, sparking conversation, expressing power,

and aiding learning.

Redaction is annotation.

The Washington Post published a page-by-page analysis titled “The Mueller Report, Annotated.”

Annotated books were routinely exchanged among scholars and friends as “social activity” throughout the Victorian era.

We approach annotation by appreciating the genre’s affordances.

A computer scientist, however, will say that annotation means labeling data—images, text, and audio—for the purposes of identifying, categorizing, and training machines and algorithms.

we discuss five notable annotation affordances. Annotation provides information, making knowledge more accessible. Annotation shares commentary, making both expert opinion and everyday perspective more transparent. It sparks conversation, making our dialogue—about art, religion, culture, politics, and research—more interactive. Annotation expresses and questions power, making civic life more robust and participatory. And it aids learning, augmenting our intellect, cognition, and collaboration. This is why annotation matters. You

five affordances: providing information, sharing commentary, sparking conversation, expressing and contesting power, and aiding learning.

We take an even simpler approach and define annotation as: A note added to a text.

our definition requires us to ask and answer four questions. First, what is a note? Second, what does it mean to add? Third, what is a text? And fourth, annotation for whom?

What Is a Note?

My original interest was partly a reaction to those arguing the advantage of paper over digital and not differentiating reading from studying.

What Does It Mean to Add?

picture yourself reading a book and jotting words in the margins as your “private exchange” with the author while “talking back to” the text.

Intertextuality

Intertextuality is essential to further understanding annotation as a note added to a text. It describes the relationship between texts.

an openly accessible and annotatable version of the book published using PubPub, the online publishing platform developed at the MIT Media Lab.

encourages conversation through annotation about published texts.

Mention kindle book opportunity to reveal popular highlights.

Whereas PubPub is a distinct platform used by many projects, the open annotation technology Hypothesis—with the ability to support collaborative reading and writing anywhere on the web, including as a part of publication platforms—has powered multiple approaches to open peer review.

Journalist and digital pioneer Esther Dyson has spoken about the need to respect both authors’ ability to control how their content is annotated and the freedom of speech that protects annotation. Dyson has suggested that “moderating entities” should work to restrict harmful (digital) speech as well as foster productive annotation that helps to circulate new discourses and knowledge.17

Annotation Aids Learning

A recent literature review of sixteen studies across seven different higher education disciplines found that student reading comprehension, peer review, motivation, and attitudes toward technology were all positively influenced by social and collaborative annotation.12

Annotation is seldom an end in and of itself; rather, it most frequently complements a repertoire

What about review - studying?

Learning with Expert Annotation

It can be challenging for students of all ages to read primary sources, understand discipline-specific content, and comprehend the concepts and methods of a domain.

Science in the Classroom (SitC) is a project that demystifies the nature of science, promotes scientific communication, and supports science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.21 SitC relies on volunteer graduate students and early career scientists who add expert commentary via public Hypothesis annotation to openly accessible articles in the Science family of journals.

A study with multiple undergraduate biology courses at Florida International University found that students perceived annotated articles as a useful study aid, particularly for understanding vocabulary and interpreting graphs.

This is different than teaching annotation skills through modeling. In this use of expert annotation, the focus is on an a content expert assisting in the understanding of a primary source.

educators’ use of annotated primary sources and educational resources can scaffold student engagement with expert ways of thinking, aid comprehension of content knowledge, and make explicit the craft of rhetoric and method.

Learning with Social Annotation

Emerging technologies and learning designs can encourage, and may be enabled by, social annotation.32

Social annotation, in educational contexts, enables learners to add multimodal notes to digital and online resources for the purposes of information sharing, peer-to-peer interaction, collaboration,

Researchers have described learners’ participation in social annotation activities as anchored discussion given how multimodal contributions are directly tethered to the source text.

Social annotation and anchored discussion are terms I imply, but should use as they make related cognitive opportunities easier to understand. This might also be described as contextualized - comments can directly linked to the material that is relevant and this connection can be shared with others.

Evidence suggests that anchored discussion helps learners participate in rich and meaningful conversation as they pay closer attention to the text, establish proximal connections between their conversation and the source material, and embrace opportunities to elaborate ideas, clarify, and learn from the viewpoints of peers.

anchored discussion via social annotation

“As We May Think” is perhaps most famous for its description of a machine that would augment the “associative trails” of the human mind. Bush called this machine the memex,

Users of the memex would “add marginal notes and comments”

we suspect others want to revisit annotation and make use of this cumulative corpus added to various texts over time—whether

This inspired vision of an annotation-enabled information infrastructure may be tempered by the proliferation of digital annotation technologies, some of which are browser based, others of which are stand-alone applications or built into electronic publication platforms, and a smaller number of which are open-source software.