Text annotation

Text Annotation is the practice and the result of adding a note or gloss to a text, which may include highlights or underlining, comments, footnotes, tags, and links. Text annotations can include notes written for a reader's private purposes, as well as shared annotations written for the purposes of collaborative writing and editing, commentary, or social reading and sharing. In some fields, text annotation is comparable to metadata insofar as it is added post hoc and provides information about a text without fundamentally altering that original text. Text annotations are sometimes referred to as marginalia, though some reserve this term specifically for hand-written notes made in the margins of books or manuscripts. Annotations are extremely useful and help to develop knowledge of English literature. Text Annotation is the practice and the result of adding a note or gloss to a text, which may include highlights or underlining, comments, footnotes, tags, and links. Text annotations can include notes written for a reader's private purposes, as well as shared annotations written for the purposes of collaborative writing and editing, commentary, or social reading and sharing. In some fields, text annotation is comparable to metadata insofar as it is added post hoc and provides information about a text without fundamentally altering that original text. Text annotations are sometimes referred to as marginalia, though some reserve this term specifically for hand-written notes made in the margins of books or manuscripts. Annotations are extremely useful and help to develop knowledge of English literature. This article covers both private and socially shared text annotations, including hand-written and information technology-based annotation. For information on annotation of Web content, including images and other non-textual content, see also Web annotation. Text annotation may be as old as writing on media, where it was possible to produce an additional copy with a reasonable effort. It became a prominent activity around 1000 AD in Talmudic commentaries and Arabic rhetorics treaties. In the Medieval era, scribes who copied manuscripts often made marginal annotations that then circulated with the manuscripts and were thus shared with the community; sometimes annotations were copied over to new versions when such manuscripts were later recopied. With the rise of the printing press and the relative ease of circulating and purchasing individual (rather than shared) copies of texts, the prevalence of socially shared annotations declined and text annotation became a more private activity consisting of a reader interacting with a text. Annotations made on shared copies of texts (such as library books) are sometimes seen as devaluing the text, or as an act of defacement. Thus, print technologies support the circulation of annotations primarily as formal scholarly commentary or textual footnotes or endnotes rather than marginal, handwritten comments made by private readers, though handwritten comments or annotations were common in collaborative writing or editing. Computer-based technologies have provided new opportunities for individual and socially shared text annotations that support multiple purposes, including readers’ individual reading goals, learning, social reading, writing and editing, and other practices. Text annotation in Information Technology (IT) systems raises technical issues of access, linkage, and storage that are generally not relevant to paper-based text annotation, and thus research and development of such systems often addresses these areas. Text annotations can serve a variety of functions for both private and public reading and communication practices. In their article 'From the Margins to the Center: The Future of Annotation,' scholars Joanna Wolfe and Christine Neuwirth identify four primary functions that text annotations commonly serve in the modern era, including: (1)'facilitat reading and later writing tasks,' which includes annotations that support reading for both personal and professional purposes; (2)'eavesdrop on the insights of other readers,' which involves sharing of annotations; (3)'provid feedback to writers or promote communication with collaborators,' which can include personal, professional, and education-related feedback; and (4)'call attention to topics and important passages,' for which scholarly annotations, footnotes, and call-outs often function. Regarding the ways that annotations can support individual reading tasks, Catherine Marshall points out that the ways that readers annotate texts depends on the purpose, motivation, and context of reading. Readers may annotate to help interpret a text, to call attention to a section for future reference or reading, to support memory and recall, to help focus attention on the text as they read, to work out a problem related to the text, or create annotations not specifically related to the text at all. Educational research in text annotation has examined the role that both private and shared text annotations can play in supporting learning goals and communication. Much educational research examines how students’ private annotation of texts supports comprehension and memory; for example, research indicates that annotating texts causes more in-depth processing of information, which results in greater recall of information. Other areas of educational research investigate the benefits of socially shared text annotations for collaborative learning, both for paper-based and IT-based annotation sharing. For example, studies by Joanna Wolfe have investigated the benefits of exposure to others’ annotations on student readers and writers. In a 2000 study, Wolfe found that exposing students to others’ annotations influenced their perceptions of the annotators, which in turn shaped their responses to the material and their written products. In a later study, Wolfe found that viewing others’ written comments on a paper text, especially pairs of annotations that present opposing responses to the text, can help students engage in the type of critical reading and stance-taking necessary for effective argumentative writing. While shared annotations can benefit individual readers, it is important to note that, 'since the 1920s, literacy theory has increasingly emphasized the importance of social factors in the development of literacy.' Thus, shared annotations can not only help one to better understand the content of a particular text, but may also aid in the acquirement of literacy skills. For example, a mother may leave marks inside a book to draw the attention of her child to a particular theme or concept; thanks to the development of audio annotations, parents may now leave notes for children who are just starting to read and may struggle with textual annotations.