Annotate the web: four ways to mark up web content

Web annotation has been a pipe dream almost since the birth of the Internet itself. Commenting in the margins of a text itself is so simple for paper and print, yet replicating the experience online remains elusive. In this article, I examine four tools for private or public web annotation. Hypothesis and Genius offer users a shareable way to annotate webpages line by line and start conversations in the margins. Pinboard and Evernote allow users to organize and save web documents and add private annotations

Discourse or gimmick? Digital marginalia in online scholarship

Marginalia has been studied as discourse, as historical documentation and as evidence of reader response. As many academic texts are now available electronically, it seems a natural step to incorporate the interactive, social functions of the Web 2.0. Digital marginalia in an academic publishing context has been a largely unsuccessful venture to this date, yet there are several promising developments. Tools have emerged that enable readers annotate online texts in an approximation of paper-based marginalia, with the additional affordances of two- (or many-) way discourse, digital archiving, and the ability to hide the annotations. This article reviews the contemporary practices of digital marginalia, narrowing in to focus on digital marginalia as a form of academic discourse and peer review. I analyse several case studies of digital marginalia and discourse within this context, including Nature’s trial of open peer review, Wellcome Open Research, PLOS ONE and PubPeer’s systems, as well as my own experience using open peer review with Hypothes.is in a special ‘disrupted’ issue of the Journal of Media Practice. The article examines the relative success of these initiatives, attitudes toward open peer review and concludes with some promising developments for the future of digital marginalia and discourse in academic publishing

NetLangEd, A Web Editor to Support Online Comment Annotation

This paper focuses on the scientific areas of Digital Humanities, Social Networks and Inappropriate Social Discourse. The main objective of this research project is the development of an editor that allows researchers in the human and social sciences or psychologists to add their reflections or ideas out coming from reading and analyzing posts and comments of an online corpus . In the present context, the editor is being integrated with the analysis tools available in the NetLang platform. NetLangEd, in addition to allowing the three basic operations of adding, editing and removing annotations, will also offer mechanisms to manage, organize, view and locate annotations, all of which will be performed in an easy, fast and user-friendly way

Measuring by marking; the multimedia annotation tool ELAN

ELAN is a multimedia annotation tool developed by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. It is applied in a variety of research areas. This paper presents a general overview of the tool and new developments as the calculation of inter-rater reliability, a commentary framework, semi-automatic segmentation and labeling and export to Theme

Theofphilo : thesaurus of philosophy

This paper aims at presenting Theof Philo – Thesaurus of Philosophy, a multilingual philosophical thesaurus developed in the framework of the European project Agora. Scholarly Open Access Resource in European Philosophy and the CNR/MIUR project SM@RTINFRA-SSHCH. Smart Integrated infrastructure of Social Sciences, Humanities and Cultural Heritage. In this paper, we will describe the methodological approaches and the workflow followed in order to build the thesaurus. We will thus show the work processes, and the criteria adopted to select the relevant philosophical terms; then we will present the lexicographical sources used to select both the interlinguistic equivalents and their intralinguistic related terms (antonyms, synonyms and so on). We conclude our paper with a description of the searching and browsing options (by topics, by semantic annotations, etc.) and of the tools we used. We will finally discuss the tests carried out and some critical aspects emerging from the work

The Impact of Computer Augmented Online Learning and Assessment

The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of an experimental online learning tool on student performance. By applying cognitive load theory to online learning, the experimental tool used was designed to minimize cognitive load during the instructional and learning process. This tool enabled students to work with programming code that was supplemented with instructor descriptions and feedback, embedded directly within the code while maintaining the original integrity of the coding environment. A sample of 24 online graduate students at a southeastern university were randomly assigned to four groups: Group 1 (Control group), Group 2 (Assessment group: the tool was used to provide feedback on student work), Group 3 (Lecture group: the tool was used to describe examples of code provided in lectures), and Group 4 (Total tool group: the tool was used to provide feedback on student work as well as describe examples of code in lectures). Student learning was measured via analysis of six online quizzes. While provision of tool-facilitated feedback alone did not appear to enhance student learning, the results indicate that students performed best when they had the opportunity to view examples of code facilitated by the tool during the learning process of new material. This implies a carefully designed online learning environment, especially while controlling for and minimizing cognitive load when presenting new information, can enhance that student learning

NetLangEd, an editor to support comment analysis

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia InformáticaThis document formally reports a M.Sc. Thesis project needed to obtain the Master’s degree in Informatics Engineering, focusing on the scientific areas of Digital Humanities, Social Networks and Inappropriate Social Discourse. The Master’s work here presented was accomplished at Universidade do Minho in Braga. The main objective of the referred Master’s project was the development of an online editor that allows researchers to add their reflections and ideas to short sentences (usually called ’comments’) that belong to a social dialogue triggered by a ’post’ on a social network or a ’news’ on social media. Those comments, to be analyzed by linguists or social science experts, are provided online and are extracted from the corpus created under the international project – NetLang. NetLangEd, the editor developed and here reported, is mainly a tool to allow the analysts to create their own notes to be associated in the right place of each comment while reading it. Basically, NetLangEd allows to highlight a multi-word term contained in the comment, using a color chosen by the user, and associate to that term an ’annotation’. An annotation is composed of two parts, a tag (also created and picked up at the user choice) and a text explaining the user idea. To make this ’annotation’ process truly dynamic, NetLangEd provides, through a simple and user-friendly set of menus, three basic operations for adding, editing and removing annotations. Additionally, the editor also provides easy to use mechanisms to manage the tags so far created, as well as to view and locate the annotations. This Master’s dissertation also describes how NetLangEd was tested for usefulness and usability. For that purpose, an experiment was designed and conducted with end-users. The results will be presented and discussed.Este documento reporta formalmente um projeto de mestrado necessário para obter o grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática, focando-se nas áreas científicas das Humanidades Digitais, Redes Sociais e Discurso Social Impróprio. O trabalho de mestrado aqui apresentado foi realizado na Universidade do Minho em Braga. O objetivo principal do referido projeto de mestrado era o desenvolvimento de um editor online que permitisse aos investigadores adicionar as suas reflexões e ideias a frases curtas (normalmente denominadas por ’comentários’) que pertencem a um diálogo social desencadeado por uma ’publicação’ numa rede social ou uma ’notícia’ nas redes sociais. Estes comentários, a serem analisados por linguistas ou especialistas em ciências sociais, são disponibilizados online e extraídos do corpus criado no âmbito do projeto internacional – NetLang. NetLangEd, o editor desenvolvido e aqui relatado, é principalmente uma ferramenta para permitir que os analistas criem as suas próprias notas para serem associadas no lugar certo de cada comentário durante a sua leitura. Basicamente, o NetLangEd permite destacar um termo com várias palavras contido no comentário, usando uma cor escolhida pelo usuário, e associar a esse termo uma ’anotação’. Uma anotação é composta por duas partes, uma tag (também criada e escolhida de acordo com a preferência do utilizador) e um texto explicando a ideia do utilizador. Para tornar este processo de ’anotação’ verdadeiramente dinâmico, o NetLangEd fornece, por meio de um conjunto de menus simples e de fácil utilização, três operações básicas para adicionar, editar e remover anotações. Adicionalmente, o editor também oferece mecanismos fáceis de usar para gerir as tags criadas até o momento, bem como visualizar e localizar as anotações. Esta dissertação de mestrado também descreve como o NetLangEd foi testado quanto à sua utilidade e usabilidade. Para esse propósito, um experimento foi desenhado e conduzido com utilizadores finais. Os resultados serão apresentados e discutidos