Annotating electronic documents

1. Annotating electronic documents Can it be made as useful as annotating paper documents? Peter Brown and Heather Brown University of Exeter, UK Peter and Heather Brown

2. Reading and Writing • The two basic skills – often combined • Writing-while-reading • making notes on important points for later reference • each note is attached to a fragment of the original document (called its ‘anchor’) • Reading-while-writing • finding and incorporating ideas from existing work Peter and Heather Brown

3. Writing-while-reading— paper documents • Annotating— scribbling notes/diagrams in the margin • easy to create . . . • . . . but difficult to find and use later • … and can be difficult to share Peter and Heather Brown

4. Annotations on PaperWordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ • Remembrance Agents and Margin Notes • annotations suggest documents relevant to one being written • add annotations to document being read • User controls essential to avoid nuisance Peter and Heather Brown

5. Writing-while-reading— electronic documents • Annotating— adding electronic notes • tedious to create (via word processors or specialised annotation programs) . . . • . . . but can be searched and retrieved easily Peter and Heather Brown

6. Existing annotation systems • For web pages: • Annotea from the Web Consortium • designed for shared annotation • not (yet) a success • Commercial products like iMarkup (offers text or voice annotations, categories, searching, … ) • Enhanced browsers, e.g. Opera • Other: • Word (and PowerPoint?) • Acrobat (too low-level for some applications) • Publishing systems, e.g. Journal of Universal Computer Science Peter and Heather Brown

7. Annotea Peter and Heather Brown

8. Reading-while-writing— paper documents • Reading other paper documents while writing to find ideas/material • tedious to incorporate material into new document • there are conventional ways (citations) to record where material came from Peter and Heather Brown

9. Reading-while-writing— electronic documents • Reading other documents while writing to find ideas/material • easy to incorporate material via cut-and-paste • can include links to original source documents Peter and Heather Brown

10. Improving the Electronic World • The vision — providing integrated electronic annotation facilities (that improve on the paper world) • Identifying opportunities and threats Peter and Heather Brown

11. Opportunity 1Proactive suggestions • Remembrance Agents and Margin Notes • annotations suggest documents relevant to the one being written • … or to document being read • Controls are essential to avoid nuisance Peter and Heather Brown

12. Remembrance AgentProactive suggestions while writing Peter and Heather Brown

13. Margin NotesProactive suggestions while reading Peter and Heather Brown

14. Opportunity 2Lifelong Annotations • Annotations are there to be re-read • Annotations stored in a repository can be searched, arranged, selectively retrieved, etc • They lead to anchors in the original documents Peter and Heather Brown

15. 3 Threats • Annotations on paper are much easier … and reading from paper is easier too (2) Breaking the flow (3) Change Peter and Heather Brown

16. Opportunity 3The Digital Desk: bringing the paper and digital worlds together • Allows electronic annotation of paper documents • recognises paper on the desk • matches text on page to electronic version • projects annotations onto document being read • allows new electronic annotations to be made Peter and Heather Brown

17. Alice Book Available as SGML text and book Used for simple grammar lesson Peter and Heather Brown

18. Alice Book Peter and Heather Brown

19. Alice SGML Text <w VBD>was <w AT0>a <w NN1>piece <w PRF>of <w NN1>paper <w PRP>with <w AT0>the <w NN2>words <w VVB>DRINK <w NN1>ME <w PRP>in <w AJ0>large <w NN2>letters<c PUN>. </p> <p><s n=063> <w CJC>But<w NP0>Alice <w VBD>was <w AT0>a <w AJ0>careful <w NN1>girl<c PUN>. <s n=064> Peter and Heather Brown

20. Active Alice GrammarNouns Nouns Nouns are words for things (cat, house, star, nose policeman, ship). Most nouns have a singular and a plural form. The common ways to turn a singular noun into its plural form are to add ‘s’ or ‘es’ (cat/cats, dish/dishes) but some have unusual plurals (pony/ponies, foot/feet) and some do not change (aircraft, sheep). More about nouns Proper nouns (names) More examples Show me the nouns in the book Peter and Heather Brown

21. Active Alice GrammarNouns was a piece of paper with the words DRINK ME in large letters. But Alice was a careful girl. ‘It can be dangerous to drink out of strange bottles, she said. ‘What will it do to me? She drank a little bit slowly. The taste was very nice, like chocolate and oranges and hot sweet coffee, and very soon Alice finished the bottle. * * * ‘What a strange feeling!’ said Alice. ‘I think I’m getting Peter and Heather Brown

22. Opportunity 4Multiple/Shared Annotations(without the CSCW baggage!) • Multiple sets of annotations can be relevant for one document • Collaborative (CSCW) systems are useful but carry heavy overheads • Personal annotations — with provision for multiple sets provide most of the advantages Peter and Heather Brown

23. Active Alice GrammarAdjectives+Nouns was a piece of paper with the words DRINK ME in large letters. But Alice was a careful girl. ‘It can be dangerous to drink out of strangebottles, she said. ‘What will it do to me? She drank a little bit slowly. The taste was very nice, like chocolate and oranges and hot sweet coffee, and very soon Alice finished the bottle. * * * ‘What a strange feeling!’ said Alice. ‘I think I’m getting Peter and Heather Brown

24. Opportunity 5Generalised Annotations to include in-line editing • Annotations can be ‘enhancements’ or ‘edits’ • Flexible user interfaces could allow annotations to be displayed out-of-line (enhancements) or in-line (edits) Peter and Heather Brown

25. Opportunity 6Annotations with data types • Types provide an easy way to handle multiple sets of annotations • Hierarchy and aggregation of types is desirable • Our experiments show that types (and metadata in general) add richness and help with retrieval methods Peter and Heather Brown

26. Opportunity 7Automatically capturingusers’ needs • The information explosion can be partially tamed by using agents to help to tailor systems to users’ needs. Amazon.com and many others already do this, though only on their own data. • Capturing a user’s history — including annotations — can aid this Peter and Heather Brown

27. Threat 3 — revisitedIssues of Change • Annotations are typically saved separately from the original document — thus, over time, the anchor can change or disappear • … in this case should annotations move (try to find the updated anchor, if any) or disappear? • How useful are ‘dangling annotations’? Peter and Heather Brown

28. Annotation in publishing • Materials: journal articles, book proposals, book drafts, on-line published documents • Referee’s comments: • Low-level comments can be represented as annotations • High-level comments, e.g. ‘The paper is verbose’ can link to examples, e.g. to some especially verbose paragraphs Peter and Heather Brown

29. Referee’s comments (continued) • may need to merge different referees’ comments • … and attach past referees’ comments to revised submissions • need to transmit between author, editor and referee • need to have ‘data types’ to distinguish different types of comment , e.g. public/private Peter and Heather Brown

30. Annotation in publishing (continued) • Proof reader’s corrections: • can these be regarded as ‘edit’ annotations? • are they fundamentally different from referee’s comments? Peter and Heather Brown

31. Annotation in publishing (continued) • Post-publishing embellishment of on-line journals: • readers’ comments and suggestions • author’s subsequent corrections and additions ‘these results are now supported by …’ • need for simultaneous shared annotations • need for control over excessive/rogue postings? Peter and Heather Brown

32. Annotation in publishing (continued) • Adding value: • e.g. Crick & Watson’s original double helix paper with an expert’s commentary/explanation added as annotation • searching all annotations for certain terms Peter and Heather Brown

33. SummaryThe Main Opportunities • Adding convenience and adding value in electronic publishing • Use generalised annotations covering edits and enhancements • Make use of proactive annotations, repositories, and types/metadata • Use annotations to help capture users’ needs, and to exploit new technology bringing paper and electronic documents together Peter and Heather Brown