So, it's okay? Yes? Yes? Okay. So, good morning to everybody. I'm going to present at Node,
a collaborative annotation system developed by ILSA Group, a research group on computing
sciences, and LATHY Group, a research group on European literary studies at Computense
University. Two groups working together three years ago, so trying to understand each other,
even if speaking different languages, so a computing one and a critical literary one.
But before giving you more technical details, please let me explain by myself as a teacher
of literature, as a philologist, as a humanist, why my team, the literary one, has launched
into this kind of a digital venture. I would like to explain why we are essentially focused
on how to lead our students towards literary reading from digital libraries. First, I would
like to replace our institutional frame in a more global context. In 2010, Computense University
was one of the first European universities that collaborated with Google's project, putting on
the web 100,000 volumes from its ancient found from 15th century to 19th century. But in our
group, we noticed that these texts, which are only digitized, are of no use to professors in
literature, and cannot be proposed as such to students, to the readers, for the mere reason
that just as they appear, these texts look unappealing, and in certain cases, unreadable
and non-exploitable for academic reading. As teachers and researchers in literature, we were
very, very disappointed. We need reliable, reader-friendly texts on four levels. First, we need full
documentations of the volume, and not just Google Books is able to provide. Second, we need the
perfect reproduction in image mode, as, for example, for this volume I work with in my class
with my students, and we need to do a perfect reproduction in text mode, but you know all kind
of problems we have with OCR. Third, we need the presentation of an enriched text, thanks to
inserting the notes, and finally, we need educational tools aiming at providing readers
with easier access to digitalized text. Unless our tools are created to come digital libraries,
scholars in my team consider that this kind of book digitization projects remains up in the air,
and our literary heritage runs the risk of being ignored. And we are in a hurry, we are in an ethical
hurry. Yes, we are convinced in the near future, literatures will be digital, or they will be no
one at all, because readers will be digital natives, and not digital immigrants with a strong accent,
as we are. So the question is, what users are we working for? That's why, for AtNote, we have
adapted button-up methodology, from the needs and demands of users to the development of a tool
for collaborative digital editing and visualization of a literary base of knowledge. We vindicate a
very productive social innovation made for and by users. In the current background, our group has
made some choices in the virtual domain. For example, about our object of research, we decided
to work on this point. First, to use image mode, because we want to bridge the gap between volumes
we have in our library, 100,000 volumes from 15th to 19th century, and electronic textualities. We
think a student should become familiar with ancient texts. And in fact, we need to make
annotation on texts that have illustrations in them. We decided to build collaboratively and
enrich texts, thanks to Inserted Note and to create educational tools. AtNote is under the auspices
of the Google's Digital Humanities Award program for 2010 and 2011. AtNote is a tool that let us
first retrieve free digitized books from Google Books collection at the moment, like this, unlike
this, and add annotations to enrich the text with research on learning purposes, like this, and tag
annotations by means of a collection of text, like this. In fact, one of the main features of
AtNote annotation model, which distinguishes it from similar approaches, is to promote the
collaborative creation of annotation schemas by communities of researchers, teachers, and students,
and the use of these schemas in the definition of annotation activities on literary works.
It results in a very flexible and adaptive model able to be used by many different communities of
experts in literature defending different critical literary theories or for different annotation
tasks. For us, as scholars, it is vital that the activity shares three sorts of collaboration.
One is straightforward in this kind of tools, the collaboration of annotations. The second one
belongs to the collaboration in building the hierarchies of concepts for the tagging of
annotations, done only by scholars in a very dynamic way, depending on one's needs as the
activity goes along. The third one belongs to the collaboration of readers, amateur students,
in building a common hierarchy for the tagging. Some words now about our annotation model. Our
annotation model is summarized in this UML class diagram. Our starting point is the user having
these two possible roles, annotator or annotator manager, which we have been calling so far a
student or scholar. The user entity may annotate by making a comment and by anchoring it into the
text. This annotation entity is qualified by the annotation type entity, which in turn belongs to
the annotation schema formed by a tree of annotation types and categories. The role of the annotation
manager is granted by all privileges, allowing them to build an annotation activity as well as
the annotation schema of the managing of users and groups. The role of annotator is only granted for
the making of the annotation and in the building of the work-oriented schema. And now I'm going to
leave you with Cesar, one of the developers of the project. Hello, okay, hello everyone. First, I just
wanted to say that my professor who was invited to do this speech was unable fortunately to come,
so I'm here on his behalf. I will briefly explain with the help of this video
the annotation tool at note. I will point out the main features of the tools in terms of usability
for this speech. The developing technologies that we have been using are the GWT on the front side
and Java technologies on the back end and we have been considering HTML5 standards in the developing.
So, at note, in the administration area, in the administration area, it's composed by into 12 parts
being catalog and templates and activity is the main one and those are worth explaining,
that are worth explaining. In the catalog or the annotation hierarchies is the administrator,
in this case, the professor is able to create a graph of concepts as animator of a taxonomy
and as well as editing this graph. So, by deleting concepts, moving concepts, renaming
or creating concepts. You can create a category that can be seen as a folder that groups
tax, the group tax, as well as as tax that will abstract what the annotation is about.
You can see at any time the graph that he's been built,
you also have the activity edition. The activity is conceived as a gathering or as a meeting of
the researchers or scholars willing to get a work annotated. So, it's composed by an interface
language that depends on the professor's language. Like if it's a Dutch professor or a Spanish
professor, he will want the language to be in his language. You've got two catalogs,
one given by the professor that is this sort of taxonomy that I explained earlier
and another catalog that is going to be left empty for the students to collaboratively build it.
You've got the books that in this case going to be the work that is going to be annotated
and the group that's going to annotate this book. The book retrieval is intuitive in a way,
it's just a search engine. You just type the work that you want to look for and you will display
this list and then you will have to choose the one that you want. Sorry, the misspelling. This
is the activity. In the activity, you've got for this video, I just choose an image, a complete
image. For this activity, you can see the metadata, if any, of the book or of the work that you're
working on and you are able to see all annotations done in this activity. If you click on the all
annotations, you can see it on the right-hand side, all the annotations done for this book.
I'm actually seeing something that I didn't see before but it's worth explaining. Can you see the
annotations that is a little bit moved aside? It's actually not an annotation but a comment
for an annotation. In the activity, you will have implicitly a sort of a forum of discussions.
I'm going to make, for this example, I just anchored the St. Martin's Bridge which is in Toledo
and I wanted to make an annotation there. I'm putting there the bridge of St. Martin.
Then, I will go to the teacher's catalog and I will tag it for this case. In this case, I will
tag it with the 16th century and Toledo. Then, I wanted to tag it as well for the name of bridge,
or category bridge or St. Martin or whatever. As I don't have it in the catalog teacher,
I will create it of my own in the student's catalog. I'll create a category in this case
of bridge, the category, and inside it, I'm going to put the St. Martin type or tag.
St. Martin inside bridge. I will use that tag for my annotation and you can see it's different
colors, the teacher's catalog and the student's catalog. Every time that I place my mouse over
the annotations, I will see the anchor of the place annotated. The density will show you
the areas of the text that have been more annotated.
We can also have the annotation browsing. It's a little bit intuitive as well. We can browse
annotations by using the tags. In this case, I can use the Toledo and St. Martin
and it will retrieve all the annotations that have the tag. If I use St. Martin,
I can always go back to the book where the annotation is done and I can edit my annotation.
There's another type of filtering, which is a logical filtering that allows you to
create rules for the fetching of annotations. For example, I could retrieve annotations done by
certain students not containing a certain tag or those sort of fetching.
Putting the rule and applying the rule, I can always see the annotations that have been retrieved
and I can always go back to the work and see the anchor and see the annotations and edit those
annotations there. This is pretty much what has been done so far with this tool.
I leave you back with Amelia.
A conclusion. Finally, just a few words about our work in progress at present. We are currently
working on interoperability issues by the creation of web services following EOAC standards. We are
working on integrating the result of our annotations activities in our e-learning
environment model, mainly as a SCORM package. More precisely, professors want to move from the
fragmented annotations to a linear academic essay. This is our students' arrival, as you have seen,
our students are able to filter annotations by tags, by authors, by dates, and retrieve them in
order to place them in a conceptual template proposed by the professor as this one in the
French tradition or this one in a more anglophone tradition. We are working on retrieving texts from
some other libraries as well, not only Google Books but also HathiTrust, for example, or even
scholars on library. We are also planning to redeveloping of the tool for the creation of
a smart form app. We are also planning on the developing of a social recommender system which
will suggest tags for the annotations. And last but not least, we are planning
to adapt our tool to other digital libraries projects at Complutense University as
a huge collection of Renaissance Spanish dialogue or to some database as women writers in history
in the frame of a ghost action where we are involved. So that is, thank you very much.