21.503 Online annotation in digital editions?

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 21, No. 503.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:47:50 +0000
         From: Peter Boot <pboot_at_xs4all.nl>
         Subject: Online annotation in digital editions

Dear colleagues,

I am compiling a list of digital editions that offer interactive online
annotation facilities. (For now) I am not interested in annotation tools
with eg. CD-rom based editions, or in external annotation tools that
might be used in conjunction with the digital edition, such as Google
Notebook, Diigo or Notefish.

The reason that I am interested is that the subject of my upcoming PhD
thesis is annotation facilities and their application in research. My
focus is on emblem books, but the subject is much wider. I am
specifically interested in annotation in scholarly text editions, but it
is hard to define these terms (=91scholarly=92, =91text=92, and
=91edition=92) precisely, and there is no need to do so here. What is
important is that it should be possible to annotate not just at the
level of the text, but at the level of text constituents =AD pages,
paragraphs or other.

There is a draft section of the thesis on=20
http://www.peterboot.nl/onlineannotationdraft.pdf. I list the sites that
I discuss there below. I'd like to hear about sites that I missed,
especially if they offer facilities that are=20
significantly different from the sites that I mention.

Thank you for your suggestions,
Peter Boot

Wikisource and wikibooks
Wikis are not very suitable tools for annotation, but the wiki is what
most people tend to think of when I talk about annotation.
See for examples:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Annotations_of_The_Complete_Peanuts,
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Grand_Inquisitor,
http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Zimmerische_Chronik,
http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Von_abtuhung_der_Bylder

Weblogging and CommentPress
Most weblog tools come with elementary comment facilities; CommentPress
is an add-on for structured comments in WordPress.
See e.g. annotation to Martin Luther King:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/natestearns/letterfrombirminghamjail/

Virtual Humanities Lab
Still at experimental stage
http://golf.services.brown.edu/projects/VHL/index.php

Online Chopin Variorum Edition
Also experimental
http://www.ocve.org.uk/

Telma
Limited facilities for private annotation and bookmarking
http://www.cn-telma.fr/
For a sample edition see http://www.cn-telma.fr/nesle/

Gallica 2 beta
Tagging at page level and bookmarks
http://gallica2.bnf.fr/

UCLA
Proper notes and bookmarks, that can be saved into collections and
shared with others
E.g. in http://digital.library.ucla.edu/canonlaw/

Collaboratories
A number of sites offer facilities for collaboration of which annotation
is only an ingredient (Collate, Ipsa, HyperNietzsche). A recent addition
is Footnote (www.footnote.com), commercial and not geared towards
scholarly use, but very remarkable in its range of annotation facilities.

Programming language manuals commenting facilities
Popular open source platforms such as PHP and Perl have manuals where
users can (and do) contribute notes. For a random sample:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/security.general.php
Again, not for scholarly use, but still an example of serious
collaborative annotation that enhances the value of texts.
Received on Sat Jan 26 2008 - 05:17:51 EST