[annotator-dev] Open Shakespeare and annotator

James Harriman-Smith jh570 at cam.ac.uk
Sat Jul 2 14:54:28 UTC 2011


 Hi Everyone,

Some of you may know me: I’m an English student at Cambridge, and have been
working on promoting and using Open Shakespeare for a while. Recently, I’ve
been studying the way people have been using the annotator (as well as
making annotating myself), and I have a few comments and observations that I
would like to share with you.

First of all, I think the annotator is wonderful: it’s a very powerful tool,
but also very simple. Nearly 500 annotations on Shakespeare’s plays is
testament to just how good it is. A few small changes could, I believe make
it even better. My ideas so far are as follows:

*Automatic annotation: for example, annotating every place name a short
description of that location, or cross referencing word of the day articles
to occurrences of that word in the texts.

*A ready-made set of tags for annotations: currently people aren’t really
using the tagging feature, I suspect because they are not familiar with the
concept. Changing the interface to have several ready-made categories (e.g.
Textual variant, vocabulary, historical context, rhetoric, and [use your own
tag]), and perhaps something like a “what kind of annotation is this?”
prompt line would increase the likelihood that users give us metadata about
their comments.

*A landing page for annotation, prompting users to sign in. At the moment,
relatively few people are signing in, which leaves their comments vulnerable
to vandalisation, and us with no way of seeing who is annotating what.

*A ‘give me a line from [this play] to annotate’ feature. People are
annotating the same passages repeatedly, and such a button would, hopefully,
even out the distribution of contributions.

I realise that some of these features would make the annotator less generic.
They would also however greatly help the users of Open Shakespeare, and
indeed every other literary text the annotator is applied to. Perhaps a
‘literary annotator’ version could be created?

Please do get in touch with me to tell me what you think of these ideas. I
would love to talk about them more with you. Again, please don’t take this
as criticism of the tool: I think that it is excellent, and would be
delighted to help you improve it by giving a user-perspective.

James
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