Text annotation
[1] Text annotations are sometimes referred to as marginalia, though some reserve this term specifically for hand-written notes made in the margins of books or manuscripts.
Thus, print technologies support the circulation of annotations primarily as formal scholarly commentary or textual footnotes or endnotes rather than marginal, handwritten comments made by private readers, though handwritten comments or annotations were common in collaborative writing or editing.
[1] Text annotations can serve a variety of functions for both private and public reading and communication practices.
For example, Ananda Gunawardena, Aaron Tan, and David Kaufer conducted a pilot study to examine whether annotating documents in Classroom Salon, a web-based annotation and social reading platform, encouraged active reading, error detection, and collaboration in a computer science course at Carnegie Mellon University.
The collaboration with peers and experts around a shared text improved these skills and brought the communities' understanding closer together.
Studies have indicated that social annotation functions, including commenting, information sharing, and highlighting, can support instruction designed to foster collaborative learning and communication, as well as reading comprehension, metacognition, and critical analysis.
This form of annotation furthers comprehension, specifically in the classroom because it requires more of students' brains to retain the information being given.
[3] Much research into the functionality and design of collaborative IT-based writing systems, which often support text annotation, has occurred in the area of computer-supported cooperative work.
A number of specialized formats (and tools) for this purpose exist, the following illustrates an annotation with as used in the Universal Dependencies project.
Various other annotation formats do exist, often coupled with certain pieces of software for their creation, processing or querying, see Ide et al. (2017)[15] for an overview.
The body of an annotation includes reader-generated symbols and text, such as handwritten commentary or stars in the margin.
The anchor is what indicates the extent of the original text to which the body of the annotation refers; it may include circles around sections, brackets, highlights, underlines, and so on.
Annotations may be anchored to very broad stretches of text (such as an entire document) or very narrow sections (such as a specific letter, word, or phrase).
In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of such systems were built in the context of libraries, patent offices, and legal text processing.
A different approach to distributed authoring consists in first gathering many annotations from a wide public, and then integrate them all in order to produce a further version of a document.
This approach was pioneered by Stet, the system put in place to gather comments on drafts of version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
This system arose after a specific requirement, which it served egregiously, but was not so easily configurable as to be convenient for annotating any other document on the web.
The service features annotation via a Chrome extension, bookmarklet or proxy server, as well as integration into a LMS or CMS.
Specialized Web-based text annotations exist in the context of scientific publication, either for refereeing or post-publication.
