Annotation:A Very Brief History

John UnsworthBrandeis University

David Foster Wallace’s copy of Don Delilo’s The Players

Scholarly Primitives

Discovering Annotating Comparing Referring Sampling Illustrating Representing"Scholarly Primitives: what methods do

humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this?” http://goo.gl/pV7FkL

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1785)

Cognates

Name Pertinent to Carrier Content

Embedded in Carrier Medium

Meant for others to read

Annotation Yes Yes Usually

Scholia Yes Initially Yes

Commentary Yes Not necessarily Yes

Marginalia Usually Always Perhaps

Graffiti Usually not Emblazoned upon Yes

Annotations Address Particulars Commentary can address itself to a whole work, and it

can stand apart from the work to which it is addressed. Graffiti is usually not about the thing it is on. There are

exceptions. Text annotation usually addresses itself intellectually to

the semantic particulars of a specific text (the word, the phrase, the concept, the passage) while locating its target according to the physical particulars of the specified text (the margin, the page, the volume, or the line)

Digital annotation must likewise address itself to the logical content of human discourse online while locating the target’s address in the chaotic welter of fleeting and competing standards, inexorable bit-rot, and universally re-flowable text.

Scholia

Scholia (singular scholium or scholion, from Ancient Greek: σχόλιον, "comment, interpretation") are grammatical, critical, or explanatory comments, either original or extracted from pre-existing commentaries, which are inserted on the margin of the manuscript of an ancient author, as glosses.

--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholia

Scholasticism: Motivations

A method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics ("scholastics," or "schoolmen") of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100 to 1700

A program of employing that method in articulating and defending dogma in an increasingly pluralistic context

An attempt … on the part of medieval Christian thinkers to harmonize the various authorities of their own tradition, and to reconcile Christian theology with classical and late antiquity philosophy, especially that of Aristotle.

--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholastic

Talmudic Commentary

By far the best known commentary on the Babylonian Talmud is that of Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, 1040–1105). The commentary is comprehensive, covering almost the entire Talmud. Written as a running commentary, it provides a full explanation of the words, and explains the logical structure of each Talmudic passage. It is considered indispensable to students of the Talmud.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud

Commentary on Selected Matters

Medieval Ashkenazic Jewry produced another major commentary known as Tosafot ("additions" or "supplements")… One of the main goals of the Tosafot is to explain and interpret contradictory statements in the Talmud. Unlike Rashi, the Tosafot is not a running commentary, but rather comments on selected matters. Often the explanations of Tosafot differ from those of Rashi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud

Derrida: Supplement

A supplement is something that, allegedly secondarily, comes to serve as an aid to something 'original' or ‘natural’. Writing is itself an example of this structure, for as Derrida points out, "if supplementarity is a necessarily indefinite process, writing is the supplement par excellence since it proposes itself as the supplement of the supplement, sign of a sign, taking the place of a speech already significant”

--Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Derrida”

http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#SH3e

Annotation as Transaction

Widespread annotation is a byproduct of putting language on paper. There’s not a lot of annotation of stone inscriptions. Starting with papyrus scrolls, though, annotation appears.

Annotation leverages paper’s inherent ability to give text material existence, making it addressable in the transaction of reference.

New media require new rules of transaction, in order to continue to support reference.

In the print world, annotation addressed itself to either a local or a canonical text.

In the digital world, annotation must have a target, and that target must have coordinates (extent, location, etc.)

Annotation as Translation

The transition from oral to written records (and from written to digital) create conditions that make annotation particularly complex and important.

Up to now, annotation has been a creature of print, but moving annotations from print to digital is not just a metaphor (not another “desktop” or “window”), because…

Annotation’s core concepts and motivations still apply.

Annotation as Metadata

The term “annotation” is used in many different contexts, usually to signify information about information, or metadata. The nature of “metadata” depends quite a bit on the nature of the data in question. For example, we annotate:GenesParts of speechBibliographiesDigitized texts

Genome Annotation:

The process of identifying the locations of genes and all of the coding regions in a genome and determining what those genes do. An annotation (irrespective of the context) is a note added by way of explanation or commentary. Once a genome is sequenced, it needs to be annotated to make sense of it.

--http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=16833

Part-of-Speech Annotation:

…the most basic type of linguistic corpus annotation - the aim being to assign to each lexical unit in the text a code indicating its part of speech. Part-of-speech annotation is useful because it increases the specificity of data retrieval from corpora, and also forms an esential foundation for further forms of analysis (such as syntactic parsing and semantic field annotation).

--http://www.sal.tohoku.ac.jp/ling/corpus2/2pos.htm

Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to books, articles, and documents. Each citation is followed by a brief (usually about 150 words) descriptive and evaluative paragraph, the annotation. The purpose of the annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited.

--http://guides.library.cornell.edu/annotatedbibliography

Manuscript Annotation

Digital libraries often integrate high-resolution viewers which allow codicological and paleo-graphical analysis of manuscripts online. There-fore, there is an increased demand that the results of such analysis (e.g., manuscript descriptions) also be available online. Manuscript descriptions … often refer to other manuscripts, collections, or scribes. Therefore an adequate system for annotating content of manuscripts is needed.

--http://jtei.revues.org/392.

Further reading

John Unsworth, "Scholarly Primitives: what methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this?” May, 2000. http://people.brandeis.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html

Todd Carpenter, “iAnnotate — Whatever Happened to the Web as an Annotation System?” April 30, 2013. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/04/30/iannotate-whatever-happened-to-the-web-as-an-annotation-system/

Michelle Baldonado, Steve Cousins, Jacek Gwizdka, and Andreas Paepcke, “Notable: At the Intersection of Annotations and Handheld Technology.” P. Thomas and H.-W. Gellersen (Eds.): HUC 2000, LNCS 1927, pp. 100-113, 2000. http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~jacekg/pubs/txt/2000_GwizdkaJ-HUC2K-LNCS-Springer_14pgs.pdf

Catherine C. Marshall, “The Future of Annotation in a Digital (Paper) World.” March, 1998. http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/uiuc-paper-complete.pdf