Welcome this morning. So during this conference you've heard a lot about
annotations and annotations tools so we're just adding to that but we have a
special focus that we will hear about in a minute and this project I must say is
really a collaborative effort that's why we also two presenters up here but
there are many more and you will see the rest of the team on a slide later on. So
just before we start that I just want to briefly mention what HyperStudio does
because it's it's truly you know different than some of the other
research labs in digital humanities. So on the one hand we are part of the
Comparative Media Studies program which is in the School of Arts, Humanities and
Social Sciences at MIT and HyperStudio focuses on the one hand on educational
tools but also on research tool of course we also develop digital
technologies but at the same time we do research we educate graduate students
and we have courses in digital humanities and as I said we also get a
contribute to the digital technologies. There are a couple of key principles in
HyperStudio that are important for thinking about how we conceptualize our
project so it's always the first thing that we talk about is the pedagogical or
the scholarly need so it's never driven by anything else but it's just really
why is a certain project useful or necessary. We have we applied to the
concepts of co-design really with faculty students and other partners and
also in terms of development we focus on agile development and a really
interesting feedback loop from all the participants. For the educational
projects and this is the special focus on what we will be talking about today
we perceive students as novice scholars so scholars and students who need to
learn the same skills to become full featured scholars and then we also
engage the learners in a process of learning discovery interpretation and
collaboration so the process is important and we rethink pedagogical
concepts and roles because of course as we all know this is changing you know
the traditional assumed roles. So for the project we're talking about today there
was a very clear need by a literate literary scholar at MIT, Win Kelly, who
we have worked with in other projects also that feature annotations called
Metamedia but that's a project that started a long time ago so we wanted to
rethink how can we engage students in literary texts you know make those texts
much more accessible but of course now we have better technological means and
we can also think in a participatory manner so it's really supporting
students in understanding notions of original sources adaptations variations
and textual editions and also notions of author and readership and editorship and
how can we effectively focus on the process of analyzing again you know see
the focus on the process and understanding and interpreting literary
texts so annotation studio the project that we'll be talking about today is
really inspired by five different areas one is readers response theory and I
will go that in in very briefly in a second it's also the history of
marginalia and then also student-centered pedagogy what modular web
technologies and there's some really interesting as we've heard throughout
this conference really interesting new technologies around and also information
visualization that we just heard also about in the previous talk so readers
response theory you know for most that's of course you know well-known and
this is just one approach but I think it's particularly applicable to the
aspect that we are trying to focus on you know knowing that there are
different kinds of readers critical reader and so on and that what we added
is the novice reader the student reader so it's really the focus on those
readers who don't have yet the experience but might become you know
more experienced critical ideal reader and whatever scholar lead readers in the
end so the reader is really a collaborator in the process of meaning
making and meaning is a process again you see the the process of the focus on
the process in this aspect and central to the reading you know of every
literary work and that's what Wolfgang Iza says is the interaction between its
structure and its recipient and I think you know that's where the title for this
talk actually comes from Iza says the reader sets the text in motion relating
different aspects to each other so the other aspect and I have to switch the
microphone so basically the other really important part in the design of this
tool is the history of marginalion annotation it's been around for centuries
it's used as a form of interact of communicating of scholarship of
interacting with texts of recording these interactions and also importantly
of organizing these interactions I mean most people might not think of this as
annotation but it is a way of indicating your presence within a text and so these
three qualities that I've just mentioned interactions organization and
communication are three qualities of the historical practice of annotation and
marginalia that we were very much interested in maintaining in the
development of a digital tool for that purpose so I'm just going to pass those back.
We switched several times in this prison so I won't put it on myself either but what do you see here also in
you know especially in this picture but also in the previous ones and in
conjunction with readers response theory when we think about the interaction with
the reader this is usually a process that's not visible and it's a private
process and what we're trying to do is to make this process visible and also
make it participatory collaborative so the pedagogical approach is on the one
hand we wanna also in these students and MIT students might be special because of
course no one goes to MIT to study humanities. So it's really to develop
traditional humanistic skills you know close reading text analysis and so on
and here in this particular and we've seen that also before in the first
paper is engage students as editors so in thinking about how they can interact
with the text and interacting through the annotations is really how to also
make the text more readable to other students so it's also to increase the
awareness about the fluid process of reading, writing, borrowing, and revision so it's a
constant back and forth process and also to allow students to practice you know
John Unsworth's scholarly primitives which I think you know are the basis of a lot
of projects so this Miximize was the very first project that we did with some
internal funding a year ago and this project was put up in two months and then
put in the classrooms for a whole year and with extensive assessment along with
that and our goal was really to come up with a very simple but effective systems
by which students can interact with the text make annotations and so on so here
you see an example of Moby Dick with all of you know this is Frankenstein
actually we have Moby Dick in there as well as we will see later and on the
right hand side you see annotations by different contributors and readers and
also multimedia annotations because it's not just a textual annotation it's
annotating with video with images with sound and so on and this is the typical
way how you can annotate it's a very simple text box one can make the
annotation visible to a larger group to private review is just with the teacher
so that could be a special dialogue going on or public in this case this
will have to be reviewed by the teacher and of course tags there are a number of
different tags that can be done on that so just very quickly what the experience
was from the student and teacher side we have a very long report about the
assessment process very interesting but it was really the focus on the
annotation gave students a powerful way to view themselves as writers and
readers so it's really as I said focusing on both processes and provided
much more precise assessment of their progress and students also develop
patience for slow reading so it's not the task because through the interaction
it's really a slower slowing down the process of reading and writing okay so
I have to go through very fast I didn't see the five minutes so so again you know
sort of it's really you know thinking about annotations in a very thoughtful
way and and so on so the technologies and so these are especially relevant to
the the advanced version of the tool mix my eyes was the like basically alpha I
guess and right now working on annotations video the actual so for
annotation studio in particular one of the critical parts of the technology is
that the word basically the text and the annotations can be stored separately so
you don't actually need to upload a text to be able to annotate it and which
means that it's a lot easier for especially for professors who already
have a lot of like a syllabus that has a bunch of links to many websites that
instead of having to go scrape that and upload that to a simple centralized
server they can just send your students to that site there's also a very
flexible annotation format we're not using a SQL database so it remains to be
seen how scalable this is but this means that we can easily change the
annotations individually so one it it doesn't what annotations don't have to
have the same exact format you can have an annotation that has for example to
source text in it in a field of annotations with only one or you can
have annotations with multiple text fields or something like that it's also
we're building this using open source tools and the project will be open
source and there's a it's just quickly the development environment it's
JavaScript and Ruby and Rails so if you're familiar with those tools it's pretty helpful to us so and this you
know this is a version of the new annotation studio and right now we're
just focusing on text but annotation studio clearly has a larger vision
annotating also images with text with videos and vice-versa so it's really a
round trip for all the different kinds of media annotating and right now the
next feature that we will be implementing for the fall is a comparison
so that students can actually annotate texts across texts and write
annotations across text visualizations is a very important aspect of that
visualization not only to focus on reader interaction to mark intense areas
of reader interaction but also as a tool for for navigation so that you can
also pick the passages and so on we're looking at a couple of different models
we have a couple of implementations they're still you know an early
processes you know this is this is a design and of course there are many other
projects out there this is a Harvard highbrow is a Harvard project which I
think is really interesting you know how it also used for annotations and so on
so there's a lot more but they're very interesting aspects so funding very
important mix in my eyes was funded internally from MIT but annotation
studio is an NEH thanks to bread digital humanities startup brand and there you
see the team members that includes faculty students developers and so on so
that's a very very brief overview if you're interested I can show you more
also of the previous project otherwise if you have questions thank you