Re: "Annotation" and "annotation" (was: RE: [data-model] Proposed Abstract for Web Annotation Data Model Spec)

With regards to both the tagging and highlighting/bookmarking cases, I do
see both of those as kinds of annotating activities.

Transcribing I tend to think of as transcribing. Your transcription example
brings me to another simmering issue though. The entire portion of the
model concerning selectors generalizes to use cases beyond annotation, as
I've mentioned to you in the past. Is there any possibility of spinning it
off into it's own standard-building activity?

Beyond it's obvious use in the transcribing example you have already given,
I have a collection building use case that requires that it be possible to
gather any arbitrary portion of any arbitrary resource into a collection.

To illustrate a specific example, I have some digital humanities scholar
who should like to gather together all of the poems written by women
authors between 1800 and 1825, i.e., early 19th century. The poetry
collection is to be used as an input for a text analysis process, as such
the scholar wants to jettison all of the extraneous material (page headers,
page footers, tables of contents, pretty much all of the structure and
metadata regarding the books that the poems appear in). The segmentation
techniques that we've already worked out during the development of the oa
model would be perfect for this task, except that the semantics of the
predicates are limited to cases of annotation. Which leaves me in the
rather awkward position of re-inventing the wheel through super-classing...
:(

My point is that annotations are not the web's swiss army knives but, this
model does have something of a monopoly on good strategies for arbitrary
segmentation of resources. We should be relatively precise with what an
annotation is and be very wary of scope creep.

An aside: some other thoughts about whether or not highlighting/bookmarking
is actually bodiless. I don't believe that these are actually bodiless.
These are both traditional, physical annotating activities and so make
sense to fold in here. The difference in this case though is the intended
target of the "annotation".

Under normal circumstances our expectation of an annotation body is that it
should contain some content of interest to a human being. We are just using
machines as the middleware to get it to that human. In the highlighting and
bookmarking case the "body's" content is directly intended for both machine
consumption and subsequently machine action, e.g., apply this style to this
arbitrary thing. This is because the human consumable content appears to be
quite abstract indeed.

If we wanted to contemplate more about what this human consumable content
is then we might consider whether or not annotating something with a color
is not in fact equivalent to annotating it with an image, or some sounds,
etc, vis a vis a human end user. It seems to me that it is and so, I'm not
so confidant that we actually have the license to say that the
highlighting/bookmarking use case is equivalent to there being no body
content in the annotation at all. It seems much safer to conclude that the
effort of carrying that content has been punted to something machine
actionable (i.e., CSS in this case) rather than the more ordinary formats
we normally expect to do that work (e.g., text, video, images, etc.). Which
begs the question as to whether or not there are additional kinds of
machine actionable annotations beyond bookmarking and highlighting. Bob
Morris's editing use case comes to mind and the idea of "expectations"
rears its ugly head once again.

Regards,

Jacob




_____________________________________________________
Jacob Jett
Research Assistant
Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship
The Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel Street, MC-493, Champaign, IL 61820-6211 USA
(217) 244-2164
jjett2@illinois.edu

On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 1:36 PM, Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Hi Jacob,
>
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 9:47 AM, Jacob Jett <jjett2@illinois.edu> wrote:
>
>> I think though we need to be clearer that it isn't just any kind of
>> association between things (RDF does that natively) but, rather it is a
>> certain kind of association. It has specific semantics and while the web
>> presents certain opportunities for new functionalities at the end of the
>> day an annotation links some content or process to a specific thing that it
>> is intended to convey some information about.
>>
>
> Typically [[weaselwords]] they are, but there are many use cases where
> people intuitively want to use an annotation without the aboutness.
>
> Some examples:
>
> * Transcribing some text in an image for accessibility ... is the
> transcribed text "about" the region of the image? Maybe?
>
> * Tagging the mention of an entity in some text with its identifier. Is
> the URI "about" the segment of text? Maybe?
>
> * Highlights and bookmarks -- there's no Body to be about the target.
>
>
>
>> I would not, for instance, use an annotation to gather things into a
>> collection. That's a very different kind of association to make.
>>
>
> Nor would I, personally, and yet tagging is often used for exactly that
> reason.  For example, tagging your music files is essentially organizing
> them into sub-collections, and interfaces let you filter on those.  Or
> github issues -- the tags (labels) are almost always used to group the
> issues into what amounts to collections.
>
> I agree (of course!) with the spirit of being precise in our definitions
> and at the same time being easy to understand and relate to, but it's very
> hard without excluding significant use cases that have been considered to
> be in scope of the work.
>
> Rob
>
>
>
> --
> Rob Sanderson
> Technology Collaboration Facilitator
> Digital Library Systems and Services
> Stanford, CA 94305
>