Annotating for the world: Attitudes toward sharing scholarly annotations

Abstract

Annotations, in the form of markings and comments on the text, are often part of scholarly work. Digital platforms increasingly allow these annotations to be shared in group and public environments. To explore scholars' current behavior and attitudes toward shared annotations, semistructured interviews with 20 doctoral students were conducted. The findings suggest that sociocognitive processes are integral to scholars' creation and use of shared annotations. However, although scholars clearly support creating and using shared annotations, several sociocognitive hurdles have hampered adoption of scholarly shared annotation systems. This article discusses common themes emerging from the findings and relates them to research on shared annotations.

Anatomy of scholarly information behavior patterns in the wake of academic social media platforms

“…Information has been collected pertaining to scholarly information behavior using quantitative studies (e.g., surveys) [50]- [52], qualitative studies (e.g., interviews) [53] [54], ethnographic observational studies [55] [56], and combinations of these. For example, Brown [57] used a combination of email survey and content analysis methods.…”

An Online Field Study on Scholarly Journal Annotations

“…The scientific value of the contribution which annotations make can of course not be assessed objectively in this analysis. But the relatively low number of annotations that do not supply arguments behind their evaluation of the article content allows the conclusion to be drawn that most annotations are not the spontaneous "scribbles" which have been observed in private marginal annotations, but are instead elaborated, curated statements, which confirms Hemminger and TerMaat's (2014) and Marshall and Brush's (2004) findings.…”

“…Authors carrying out research or publishing on a topic related to the annotated publication insert references to their own work,⁴⁰ thus promoting it. Other researchers can also defend differing views on a scientific subject.⁴¹ The general audience, on the other hand, gets the chance to ask and receive answers to questions about the article content.⁴² The relatively low annotation rate can be explained by the often-noted restraint that interviewees expressed about making public statements about scientific works (Hemminger and TerMaat 2014).…”

“…A noteworthy feature of Hemminger and TerMaat's (2014) and Marshall and Brush's (2004) studies is that they describe a two-step process that involves first making a note for personal purposes and, in a later step, publishing it. There is no suggestion that public annotations could have been written as such, and therefore represent an annotation type sui generis.…”

Supporting Collaborative Information Seeking Through Shared Annotations

“…Furthermore, while some work has investigated readers' perceptions of shared annotations (e.g., Hemminger & TerMaat, 2014), it is not clear how readers assess the quality of shared annotations. What attributes of shared annotations, for example, are most important to readers when they assess quality?…”