Digital Explanatory Annotations for Literary Texts: Possibilities - Practices - Problems - Prospects

This thesis is concerned with digital explanatory annotations that are meant to help readers understand, interpret, and enjoy literary texts. The first chapter outlines the advantages of digital over printed annotations. The second chapter evaluates the annotations in eleven digital editions. The focus lies on their extent and systematization, their layout, their use of links and multimedia elements, their citeability, and on whether they were created collaboratively or not. The third chapter is concerned with TEASys – a system developed at the university of Tübingen which helps annotators structure their explanations with regards to length/depth and content. This system allows readers to choose which parts of an annotation they want to read for their individual interests and research purposes. The fourth chapter discusses the results of a survey concerned with students’ attitudes towards digital reading and digital annotations. The last chapter outlines three challenges that digital annotations are still facing: (1) readers’ preference for printed texts (2) the questions how the academic quality of collaboratively written annotations can be guaranteed, and (3) the question how digital annotations that are constantly being revised can be archived.This version of the MA thesis contains minor revisions (e.g. corrections of misspellings and line breaks).Revised version published in January 2021: http://hdl.handle.net/10900/11199

Self-Annotated Literary Works 1300-1900: An Extensive Collection of Titles and Selected Metadata

[Please refer to the pdf titled "Information on the Collection" for more detailed information.] This collection was created in the context of my PhD thesis titled "The Author as Annotator: Ambiguities of Self-Annotation in Pope and Byron" (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 2021, GRK 1808 “Ambiguität”, DFG-Projektnummer: 198647426). It lists more than 1100 literary works published between 1300 and 1900 that feature self-annotations, i.e. marginal notes, footnotes, or endnotes written by the author of the work. Self-annotations here only refer to notes that were published in a work, not private, handwritten comments in the author’s own copy. The aim of this collection is threefold. First of all, it shows the prevalence and variety of literary self-annotation before 1900. While authorial notes in post-1900 literature have received a considerable amount of critical attention, the number and ‘experimentality’ of earlier self-annotations is often underestimated among literary scholars. The present collection strives to correct this view. Secondly, the collection reveals general tendencies in the field of literary self-annotation, providing tentative answers to questions like ‘when did it become popular to use both footnotes and endnotes in the same work?’. Thirdly and most importantly, this collection is meant to provide an incentive and starting point for further research by laying the (albeit yet insufficient) groundwork for quantitative research, by including a multitude of now-forgotten works, and by citing relevant secondary literature on as many titles as possible.Diese Datei wurde unter den Bedingungen der „Creative Commons - Namensnennung - Keine kommerzielle Nutzung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen“ - Lizenz (abgekürzt „cc-by-nc-sa“) in der Version 3.0 veröffentlicht. Sie darf entsprechend dieser weiterverwendet werden

Digital Explanatory Annotations for Literary Texts: Possibilities - Practices - Problems - Prospects (revised version of the original 2017)

This pdf (published in January 2021) is a slightly revised version of the original 2017 document. Some of the links included in the 2017 document have been updated. The content of this thesis has remained the same. Please refer to the present pdf when citing this thesis. The original 2017 version can be found here: http://hdl.handle.net/10900/80731 --- This thesis is concerned with digital explanatory annotations that are meant to help readers understand, interpret, and enjoy literary texts. The first chapter outlines the advantages of digital over printed annotations. The second chapter evaluates the annotations in eleven digital editions. The focus lies on their extent and systematization, their layout, their use of links and multimedia elements, their citeability, and on whether they were created collaboratively or not. The third chapter is concerned with TEASys – a system developed at the university of Tübingen which helps annotators structure their explanations with regards to length/depth and content. This system allows readers to choose which parts of an annotation they want to read for their individual interests and research purposes. The fourth chapter discusses the results of a survey concerned with students’ attitudes towards digital reading and digital annotations. The last chapter outlines three challenges that digital annotations are still facing: (1) readers’ preference for printed texts (2) the questions how the academic quality of collaboratively written annotations can be guaranteed, and (3) the question how digital annotations that are constantly being revised can be archived. This version of the MA thesis contains minor revisions (e.g. corrections of misspellings and line breaks)