Why Annotate?

Created by , 2023

Welcome to “Why Annotate?” This course explores the theory, practice, and significance of annotating documents. Annotation is one of the most important aspects of historical and critical editing because it provides a variety of explanatory and contextual tools you can use to help readers understand the texts you plan to publish. In this course, you’ll explore not only different types of annotation but also the ways that annotation differs between print and digital formats.

  • Approx. 3 hours to complete
  • Self-paced, progress at your own speed
  • 100% Online
  • Free

This course is part of the Fundamentals Series

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About this course

Welcome to “Why Annotate?” This course explores the theory, practice, and significance of annotating documents. Annotation is one of the most important aspects of historical and critical editing because it provides a variety of explanatory and contextual tools to help readers understand the texts you plan to publish. In this course, you’ll explore not only different types of annotation but also the ways that annotation differs between print and digital formats.

What you'll learn

  1. to demonstrate the value and functions of annotation as editorial contributions to your historical documents.
  2. to distinguish between scholarly and critical annotation.
  3. to articulate the key forms of apparatus.
  4. to identify places in a text that require annotation.
  5. to compare print and digital annotation.

Additional Resources

Charles Cullen. “Principles of Annotation in Editing Historical Documents; or, How to Avoid Breaking the Butterfly on the Wheel of Scholarship,” in Literary and Historical Editing, ed. by George L. Vogt and John Bush Jones (University of Kansas Libraries, 1981). https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/5883/libseries.num46.pdf;sequence=1

Julia Nantke and Frederik Schlupkothen, editors. Annotations in Scholarly Editions and Research: Functions, Differentiation, Systematization (De Gruyter, 2020) https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110689112

Ronald Schuchard, “Yeats's Letters, Eliot's Lectures: Toward a New Focus on Annotation,” Text, vol. 6 (1994), pp. 287–306.

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All categories Analyzing Your Audience Analyzing Your Documents Annotation Annotation in Practice Cataloging Collection Courses Digitization Encoding Organizing Your Documents Public Engagement Publishing Images of Documents Publishing Options Quality Control Securing Permissions Selecting Documents to Publish Selection Tools & Technologies Topics Transcribing Documents Transcription User Experience What Will Your Edition Look Like? Why Annotate Why Edit?

  • The use of descriptive, contextual, referential, or illustrative content or structure that supports the discoverability and accessibility of source materials. Annotation may take many forms (footnotes, source notes, metadata, glossaries, essays, indexes, keywords, images, maps, and more) and multiple forms of annotation may be used by a project.

  • The “supports” of any edition (other than the reading text itself) that are created for the purpose of providing additional clarifying information. Typically, this term is applied to textual and contextual notes, but it can also apply to introductions, headnotes, dictionaries, lists, indexes, and appendices as well as newer, innovative annotation types, such as data visualizations.

  • A collection of “authority records” (usually in a database or in a structured data file like XML) with stable, reliable information about places, people, and other kinds of named entities.

  • A particular kind of annotation that records textual notes about the sources of the reading text and, in some cases, information about authoritative readings when multiple versions of a text exist.

  • Similar to an authority file (or list), a gazetteer is a database that combines name authority files into a stable, reliable source about places, people, and other kinds of named entities to which websites can connect. Gazetteers are often used in Linked Open Data (LOD) projects, which connect their projects to gazetteers to link them to the “semantic web.” Examples include Wikidata, Geonames, and VIAF.

  • A note or essay that precedes the presentation of source material or a collection of source materials. It is a form of annotation used for introducing or discussing the source material.

  • While an index refers to a list at the end of a printed book that helps you to find the location of certain references, indexing in digital editions is a means of serializing data in a digital edition so that certain semantic elements (identifiers, people, places, dates) can be processed and accessible.

  • Usually in printed editions, the lemma signals the place in the reading text to which a note is referring.

  • Essentially, data about data. It can be used to describe the content, physical or structural features, and/or administrative elements of data. In providing such descriptions, metadata supports the management and discoverability of data. See the University of North Carolina Library's definition of metadata for more information: https://guides.lib.unc.edu/metadata/definition.

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