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.

Hi everyone!

My name is Jason Lipshin and I’m a research assistant with Hyperstudio, MIT’s digital humanities research lab. Along with HyperStudio’s Director Kurt Fendt and Lead Developer Jamie Folsom, I’d like to propose a workshop on Annotation Studio, a digital annotation tool we’re currently in the process of developing. Created specifically for classroom use, Annotation Studio enables online, multimedia annotation of source documents by allowing users to collaboratively comment on a text at any scale (from a single word to an entire chapter, using different kinds of media).

Although there are many annotation tools currently in existence, Annotation Studio differs in its emphasis on pedagogy. While other tools often focus on annotation for the purposes of historical scholarship or assume familiarity with technical standards like TEI, Annotation Studio makes sophisticated analytic tools immediately accessible to students, with the aim of fostering skills in close reading and composition. Implemented in many MIT humanities classrooms over the past year, Annotation Studio has been used to support every step of the writing cycle, from students’ first engagement with primary sources to essay writing and revision. By supporting such practices as the filtering and exporting of annotations, as well as the importing of student texts (so that teachers can use the tool for feedback), many instructors have responded that Annotation Studio has allowed their students to engage with texts at a greater level of granularity.

In addition to its current, core functionality, Annotation Studio will also eventually feature innovative data visualization tools which track students’ interaction with a text (these tools are currently in development). Such visualizations could allow teachers to better understand how students read and interpret (for instance, identifying particular “hotspots” of interest within a text), while also allowing teachers to iteratively revise their lesson plans based on this dynamic feedback. Through this workshop, we hope to introduce Annotation Studio to interested parties, but also discuss the larger significance of annotation practices to humanities pedagogy and how such insights might fold back into the development of our tool.

Is anybody interested in a workshop on or discussion of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses)? There are a lot of interesting technology/humanities questions that come up with MOOCs, one obvious one being: how can humanities courses be structured and evaluated in a purely online setting with tens of thousands of students? MOOCs currently available through edX, Coursera, and others are overwhelmingly in the sciences, especially computer science–how could that change over the next few years?

Would there be any possibility of pulling together a workshop on Omeka that would also include a Scripto element? It would not have to be limited to Scripto specifically, but anything on crowdsourcing transcription/editing/curation would be great!

I would love find out more about GIS, if anyone’s willing.