emargin.bcu.ac.uk

Research & DevelopmentUnit for English Studies

Matt Gee & Andrew Kehoe

A collaborative textual annotation tool

Literary StudyHow do you study a literary text?

‘Close Reading’: detailed study of short text extracts down to individual word level.

• (re-)read the text

• underline important words

• make notes in margin

• colour-code

• draw out themes/motifs

• (re-)read the text

• underline important words

• make notes in margin

• colour-code

• draw out themes/motifs

• Text quickly becomes cluttered with underlining/ notes on each re-reading

• Annotations tied to printed copy of text

• Annotations not archivable / searchable

• Text quickly becomes cluttered with underlining/ notes on each re-reading

• Annotations tied to printed copy of text

• Annotations not archivable / searchable

Increasing emphasis on e-texts

but surprising lack of software to

support close reading.

Difficult to annotate

Difficult to share annotations

Not fine-grained enough for

academic study

Increasing emphasis on e-texts

but surprising lack of software to

support close reading.

Difficult to annotate

Difficult to share annotations

Not fine-grained enough for

academic study

Demonstration…

Our solution:

Web-based collaborative annotation system operating down to word level.

HIGHLIGHT CLICKED

MULTIPLE ANNOTATIONS

MOUSE DRAGGED

COMMENT ENTERED

ANNOTATION SAVED

ANNOTATION ADDED TO TEXT, AVAILABLE TO

OTHER USERS

ANNOTATION OPENED

REPLY ENTERED

REPLY SAVED, AVAILABLE TO OTHER

USERS

NEW HIGHLIGHT

COLOUR CHOSEN

TAG ENTERED

ANNOTATION SAVED

TAG SAVED IN ANNOTATION

TAG CLOUD

LOOK UP HIGHLIGHTED TEXT IN THE OED(FOR EXAMPLE)

INTERESTING, YEAH?

Possible Future Features• Integration with Virtual Learning Environments

– Seamless transition between VLE and eMargin

• Layers of annotation on single texts

– Named layers

– Turn layers on/off

• Annotation of multi-media

– Images, Audio, Video

Possible Future Features• Integrate Corpus Linguistic methods

– Collect texts in a corpus

– Tools

• Concordancing

• Wordlists

• Keywords

• Ngrams

• Collocation

• Import and Export

– XML

Future Plans• Keep developing and keep trialing with end-users

• Explore use in Literature, Linguistics, Acting and Stage Management

• eMargin transferable to any text-based discipline: Law, Social Sciences, History, Theology, Languages

emargin.bcu.ac.uk