How we annotate

Cathy Marshall

Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley

iAnnotate

11 April 2013

And does it matter in a digital age?

Reflections on 17-odd years of feral (and some not-so-feral) ethnography

annotator

order

function

value

why I can’t stop being fascinated by annotations...

from DFW Collection, Ransom Center, UT

annotations are a window to the soul

“The reason I encouraged such annotations [in FRESS] was that I remembered that when I was in college with Ted [Nelson], I would always grab the dirtiest copy of a book from the library, rather than the cleanest one, because the dirtiest ones had the most marginalia, which I found helpful.”

Andy van Dam Hypertext ‘87 Keynote

why annotations are so important in digital media...

...annotations are a crucial form

of interactivity in a medium where use is otherwise invisible

“The compact disc. It doesn’t wear out, even if you use it. Terrifying. It’s as though you’d never used it. So it’s as though you didn’t exist. If things don’t get old any more, then that’s because it’s you who are dead.” --Jean Baudrillard

v.

All annotations are not created equal

but should it matter from a systems perspective?

unselfconscious response to a text

published annotation

or perhaps some of us are talking about ontological annotations for the semantic web

so... in about 1996, I came to annotations (as a hypertext

researcher) wondering:

are annotations just links?

i.e., as Gertrude Stein would say, “an annotation is an annotation

is an annotation”

Looking more closely at annotations as a record of reading and as communication

Form: what is the structure of (personal) annotations?

Function: how are (personal) annotations used?

Value and status: do (personal) annotations have any long-term value? Under what circumstances are they shared?

Form

but it’s important to remember that most annotations are highlights and underlines…

Annotation Type Frequency

Compound (anchor + note/symbol) 153 (10.0%)

Note (unanchored) 120 (7.8%)

Underline/highlight/margin bar 1262 (82.2%)

Marking Strategies

• Form follows expected use

• Tendency to use the writing implement that’s “to hand”, be it stylus, pen, etc. (note: this holds for personal annotations )

• Noticeable individual styles

• Infrequent use of idealized functions (e.g. color coding schemes); in systems, these are easy to design, hard to keep using

Function

interpretive (commentary)

interpretive, implicit (emphasis and relative importance)

non-interpretive (reflection of the material circumstances)

non-interpretive (visible trace of reader’s attention)

gathering as annotation

… what happens if we aggregate marks ...

• consensus is significantly more common than predicted by a strict probabilistic calculation of overlap

• annotators converge on important text that is different than the text that the authors and publisher designate as important

Status and value

“I have come to view margins as a literary commons with grazing room for everyone – the more, the merrier.” “Not everyone likes used books. The smears, smudges, underlinings, and ossified toast scintillae left by their previous owners may strike daintier readers as a little icky, like secondhand underwear.”

Anne Fadiman in

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Annotations are crucial to forming a personal information geography…

“So of this I’m starting to skim more. As it talks about things that are less relevant. I can’t remember – here’s another highlight, so I definitely read this far. Uh. I think I read to the end of the chapter. Yeah, there’s another highlight.”

-A student flipping through e-book pages

Over time, annotations may lose their value or be forgotten…

“Some of them [the annotations] are absolutely ridiculous and I can’t believe that I actually wrote this in pen in this book. Some of them are – I have no idea what I’m talking about. Some of them are really interesting, and it’s something I’d forgotten. It just depends on the notes. …

When I did Milton, we were doing the epithets about Satan or something, so I underlined all of them. And when I was going back through it, I’m like ‘what on earth!’”

- A grad student talks about the annotations she made as an undergrad

They may also lose their meaning…

“I’m sure it had some significance at the time.”

Bookmarks: revisiting mysterious places

“Yeah, I have a dog-ear in here… I can’t remember what that signified. But at the time when I folded the page over and probably at the appropriate instance after that, I remembered what that meant.”

digital paper

What about their immediate value to others? Not likely.

do we share personal annotations? are some kinds

more likely to be shared?

Annotation Type Frequency Number shared

Compound (anchor + note/symbol)

153 (10.0%) 55 (35.9%)

Note (unanchored) 120 (7.8%) 23 (19.2%)

Underline/highlight/ circle/margin bar

1262 (82.2%) 42 (3.3%)

How 120 shared personal annotations changed

Verbatim 10 (8.3%)

Expanded 41 (34.2%)

Profoundly changed (for intelligibility) 16 (13.3%)

Anchor -> Anchor + content 52 (43.3%)

Anchor stays, content differs 1 (0.8%)

what’s changed in 17 years?

• FORM: better digital reading surfaces & better annotation tools

• FUNCTION: creative ways to use digital annotations (but semantic ones remain controversial)

• VALUE: still minimal prospects for digital annotations in the long term... but maybe that’s okay

contact info:

cathymar@microsoft.com

http://research.microsoft.com/~cathymar

http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall

blog—http://ccmarshall.blogspot.com

twitter—http://twitter.com/ccmarshall