Notes from Teaching Literary Reading through collaborative annotation

Google Doc link

• Do students respond to peer pressure?
• What do you do about students’ need to “grope for meaning” (privacy)
• Disappointment with available texts (not enough editions available authoritatively annotated)
• Can students embed their research in a text?
• Can students refer back to their own annotations? Others’ annotations?
• Check out H20 from Berkman center — legal texts, casebooks
• Is a “commonplace” book the same as annotation? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book
• Annotation of objects — 3d models at MetaLab (eg for museum collections)
• SocialBook — works well — community lacking?
• Annotating library catalog records perhaps?
• Digital Public Library of America — example of the effort to make resources accessible
• We might need a taxonomy of kinds of annotations
• To build that into the tool or not? (Annotation Studio’s approach is not to build-in this sort of pre-determined interpretation of annotation activity — Jamie)
• Link to Annotation Studio website (explanatory context) Link to Annotation Studio public demo version (let me know if you’d like help getting set up)
• Crocodoc “kind of fun!” — ingests PDFs
• What changes about our idea of texts if/as we annotate? What does the tool do for us/to us?
• “Agon of multiple intelligences” within a text — what does that do to our reading?
• Idea from Best American Essays: students can’t sit alone with a text as easily anymore Garrett Keyser (sp?)
  • Two girls who got through Ethan Frome by reading together via Skype (cool! cool?)
  • Some students are more interested in Drama and Poetry (because it’s performance and/or somehow more social in nature)
• To have a social reading experience is not just to be distracted, but also to be more connected to other people.
• Do students still have the capacity for sustained focus?
• Tension between close reading and just skimming
• Over-achievers clobber the text with their annotations in crocodoc.
• “Annotation that kills” (discussion), is not helpful — provides an answer, not a question!
• We have to teach student these things if we ask them to annotate. Make those ideas explicit.
• Instructor gets more visibility into the students’ reading of the text.
• Might eliminate some of the class time spent on locating areas of interest, allow discussion to cut to the chase, as it were.
• “Motion away from the text” — note-taking as a precursor to analytical activity
• Collaborative essay writing? Interesting idea. Bold!
• Micro to macro reading
• Start with a text that students are annotating, and going to a text that they produced, maybe all the way to an Anthology
• How would you annotate a video (or other time-based text?)
  • Like tweets during a TV viewing?
  • Soundcloud for audio is a nice example
  • Timeline — visualization
  • Google search/books
  • Internet archive — thumbnails culled from
• Zeega — annotation of video — very cool!
• SavePublishing — bookmarklet to locate “tweetable” sentences — interesting proof of concept — it’s not too hard to do some kinds of “computed preprocessing” of text, perhaps as a scaffold to close reading.
• Voting — thumbs up/down might be a good feature for annotations/documents to locate best notes.
• Make selection of high-quality annotations a task for students?
• Overall activity could have as a goal to create a product that is somehow better than the original text.
• Perhaps collaborative online annotation can “make students aware of the ‘meaning of the screen’” — Great point!
• A paper-based text is easily annotated, but we can all remember the first time we realized that it was “licit” to make notes in a book — a revelation! A screen-based text is somehow beyond reach until/unless we provide screen-based annotation tools.
• Same with the screen — power is in play.