Annotations are essentially writings about other writings. And this is important.
If we abstract it, we could think of a paper being a collection of annotations.
- Annotation mean essentially add-a-note to a document. How this is done and where the ‘annotation’ lives is not a trivial matter if we are to unleash the potential of annotations. That is what I am trying to work out here.
- Notes do not need to be added to other information, in contrast with Annotations.
- Document in this context refers to a thoughtful, coherent text intended, at some point, for publication/sharing.
- The workflow of an annotation or note is for the user to mark down a note about something, either in full text or as a glyph or color on a document (such as a color tab, underline, note in the margin) or separately, in a different document. There are several related terms, such as underlining, glossing and so on, which are ‘annotations’ in the way used here. This has been shown to be useful to increase the user’s understanding of the text.
- Annotated Bibliography is a structured list of research sources (books, articles, documents) where each citation is followed by a brief paragraph—the annotation—that summarizes, evaluates, and reflects on the source’s relevance and quality.
Interaction with Annotation
To Review single document with Annotations. For this the user will access the document and choose to view annotations in situ or separately, linearly, mapped or categorized, where the user should be able to specify what is useful, what should be hidden or deleted and to copy as citation if this then leads to a new document. Reader features the start of this, allowing users to highlight sections and choose what annotation to assign to them with are then marked in color, as well as option to write notes anywhere and a single ‘Annotation’ option per document, which can be used to compile Annotated Bibliographies
To Review a series of documents with Annotations. This is where the user should be able to interact with Annotations as first-class-objects, not being only inside documents.