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Text annotation is the practice and the result of adding a note 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.^[1] Historically, text annotations have been produced as Marginalia. This article covers hand-written and information technology-based annotation, including Web-based text annotation. For annotation of Web objects see Web annotation.

Uses of Text Annotations

Writing and Editing

Text annotations have long been used in writing and revision processes and peer review to suggest changes and communicate about revisions to a text. With the advent of digital technologies and electronic annotations, authors may also be able to learn from their audiences by seeing the types of annotations they create while reading.

Learning

The practice and results of text annotations are used by educators to support a range of learning goals, including reading comprehension and error identification, active reading, collaborative learning, metacognition, search strategies, and motivation. ^[2] ^[3] Such uses also extend beyond the classroom and offer powerful benefits for professionals, who may use annotations to more fully understand training materials and myriad other documents which they encounter on a daily basis. ^[4]

Social Reading

Text annotations can be a component of social reading practices such as book groups in which readers discuss books and share annotations or reviews. One example of such social reading practices can be found with Amazon's Kindle platform, with which it is possible to share one's notes with other Kindle users. ^[5]

History

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 manuscript and were thus shared with the community; sometimes annotations were copied over to new versions when the manuscripts were later recopied. (Lebow, Lick, and Hartman p. 1066; Wolfe and Neuwirth 2001, p. 333)
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 become more the private activity of a reader interacting with a text. Annotations made on shared copies of text (such as library books) are sometimes seen as devaluing the text or as an act of defacement (Lebow, Lick, and Hartman, p. 1066; also Wolfe and Neuwirth 2001, p. 333). Thus print technologies support the circulation of annotations primarily as formal scholarly commentary or textual footnotes rather than marginal, handwritten comments made by private readers. (Wolfe and Neuwirth 2001, p. 133)
With the rise of IT technologies and the web, new technologies for text annotation have become available. These technological innovations have afforded opportunities for individual and socially shared text annotations for that support multiple purposes, including readers’ individual reading goals, learning, social reading, writing and editing, and other practices. (cited Lebow, Lick, and Hartman, p. 1067). Text annotations that are shared through the Web are sometimes referred to as Web annotations, though some consider the term Web annotation to encompass more annotations of texts meant to be read or consumed. (???) Text annotation in IT or Web systems also differs from traditional, paper-based text annotation (whether manuscript or print) in that it involves considerations of the technical aspects of the annotation system including access, linkage, and storage, or how the annotation is connected to and stored in relation to the document. (Shabajee and Reynolds)

Designs for IT and Web annotation interfaces

IT-based text annotation

In the 1980s and 1990s a number of standalone or client-server annotation systems were built in the context of libraries, patent offices and legal text processing. Their design led researchers to produce taxonomies of annotation forms.^[6] Text annotation research took place in particular in Xerox research centers in Palo Alto and Grenoble (France), in the Hitachi Central Research Lab (in particular for annotation of patents), and in relation with the construction of the new French National Library between 1989 and 1995^[7] at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse and in the company AIS (Advanced Innovation Systems).

Annotation functionality has been present in text processing software for a long time through inlines notes displayed as pop-ups, footnotes and endnotes, but it is only recently that functionality for displaying annotations as marginalia has appeared in OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice Writer or Microsoft Word. SOME KIND OF CITATION WOULD BE HELPFUL HERE. WHAT EXACTLY DOES "RECENTLY" MEAN?

Web-based text annotation

Web-based text annotation systems permit users to upload and annotate texts so that readers can share annotations and easily access them using a simple Web browser.^[8] ^[9] EXPAND THIS DEFINITION AND EXPLANATION A precursor system was Stet, the system put in place to gather comments on drafts of version 3 of the GNU General Public License. This system required preparation of the text to be submitted to comments and its software architecture did not make easy to transform it into a Web service where every user can upload a text to submit it to annotations. The co-ment system uses annotation interface concepts similar to Stet's, but it is based on an entirely new implementation, using Django/Python on the server side and various AJAX libraries such as JQuery on the client side. Both Stet and co-ment are licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License.

Modern text annotation systems are collaborative software including text editing and versioning functionality in addition to annotation and commenting interfaces. They can be seen as dual of a wiki: the front view is the annotation and discussion interface with editing being accessible on demand, while in wikis the front-view is the editing interface and the discussion page is in the background.

One popular mainstream service which makes use of annotations features is Google Docs, which allows users to collaboratively share documents both in real-time as well as asynchronously. ^[10] Such collaboration can take the form of actual document edits, as well as more traditional annotations, all of which are uniquely identified by user.

Specialized Web-based text annotations exist in the context of scientific publication, either for refereeing or post-publication. The on-line journal PLoS-One published by the Public Library of Science has developed its own Web-based system where scientists and the public can comment on published articles. The annotations are displayed as pop-ups with an anchor in the text.

List of Web-based text annotation systems
Online Kindle (shared annotations)

Open Bookmarks

Commentpress
Classroom Salon
HyLighter

References

^ Shabajee, P. and D. Reynolds. "What is Annotation? A Short Review of Annotation and Annotation Systems". ILRT Research Report No. 1053. Institute for Learning & Research Technology. Retrieved March 14, 2012.
^ Gunawardena, A. (June 26-30). "Encouraging Reading and Collaboration Using Classroom Salon". ITiCSE '10. ACM: 254–258. doi:10.1145/1822090.1822162. ISBN 9781605588209. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ Novak, E. (2012). "The Educational Use of Social Annotation Tools in Higher Education: A Literature Review". Internet and Higher Education. 15: 39–49. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2011.09.002. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ Wolfe, J.L., and Christine M. Neuwirth [1], From the Margins to the Center: The Future of Annotation, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 2001, 15: 333.
^ Amazon Kindle: Frequently Asked Questions [2]
^ Marshall, Catherine C.: Annotation: from paper books to the digital library, Proceedings of the ACM Digital Libraries '97 Conference, Philadelphia, PA.
^ Virbel, Jacques, Reading and managing texts on the Bibliothèque de France station, The digital word: text-based computing in the humanities book contents, MIT Press 1993, Cambridge, USA, pp 31-51.
^ Aigrain, Philippe, Environnement et outils pour un nouvel espace public : A travers les outils d'annotation et commentaires sur les textes, talk at the Atelier Internet, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, 11 February 2008.
^ Glover, Ian (2007). "Online Annotation --Research and Practices". Computers & Education. 49 (4): 1308–1320. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2006.02.006. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ Google Docs [3]

External links

http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments - example of use of Stet
http://www.co-ment.org - co-ment community site
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000139 - example of PLoS ONE's reading and annotation interface
http://www.openbookmarks.org/
http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/
http://www.classroomsalon.org/