Discourse or gimmick? Digital marginalia in online scholarship

Skains, R. Lyle

doi:10.1177/1354856519831988

Cited by 4 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Annotation, or the addition of a note to a text, is a practice intimately associated with reading, thinking, learning and scholarly discourse that predates, by hundreds of years, our digital era (Adler, 1940; Marshall and Brush, 2004; Skains, 2019; Unsworth, 2000). Today, annotation tools – and associated instructional arrangements and activity structures – help enable a range of learning practices such as reading comprehension, collaboration and peer review (Gao, 2013; Nokelainen et al , 2005; Schacht, 2015; Zywica and Gomez, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“When I saw my peers annotating”

Kalir

Morales

Fleerackers

et al. 2020

ILS

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Purpose Social annotation (SA) is a genre of learning technology that enables the annotation of digital resources for information sharing, social interaction and knowledge production. This study aims to examine the perceived value of SA as contributing to learning in multiple undergraduate courses. Design/methodology/approach In total, 59 students in 3 upper-level undergraduate courses at a Canadian university participated in SA-enabled learning activities during the winter 2019 semester. A survey was administered to measure how SA contributed to students’ perceptions of learning and sense of community. Findings A majority of students reported that SA supported their learning despite differences in course subject, how SA was incorporated and encouraged and how widely SA was used during course activities. While findings of the perceived value of SA as contributing to the course community were mixed, students reported that peer annotations aided comprehension of course content, confirmation of ideas and engagement with diverse perspectives. Research limitations/implications Studies about the relationships among SA, learning and student perception should continue to engage learners from multiple courses and from multiple disciplines, with indicators of perception measured using reliable instrumentation. Practical implications Researchers and faculty should carefully consider how the technical, instructional and social aspects of SA may be used to enable course-specific, personal and peer-supported learning. Originality/value This study found a greater variance in how undergraduate students perceived SA as contributing to the course community. Most students also perceived their own and peer annotations as productively contributing to learning. This study offers a more complete view of social factors that affect how SA is perceived by undergraduate students.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“When I saw my peers annotating”

Kalir

Morales

Fleerackers

et al. 2020

ILS

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“…Reuse and remix are probably most well-known within a scholarly environment through their connection to open licenses, brought on by the increasing adoption of Creative Commons licenses that allow (commercial) reuse or derivatives within academic publishing. 12 In the context of the open access movement, reuse falls under the distinction introduced around by Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad between gratis and libre open access, 13 capturing a positive connotation (describing kinds of access rather than kinds of access barriers) in relation to the removal of price and permission barriers as formulated in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (part of the BBB definition of open access). But the focus on reuse rights ultimately derives from computer science and from the open software movement, where the original gratis/libre distinction concerns software-or code.…”

Section: Reuse and Remixmentioning

confidence: 99%

Part 1: Interaction in Context

Adema¹,

Moore²,

Steiner³

2021

Promoting and Nurturing Interactions With Open Access Books: Strategies for Publishers and Authors

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Web-based annotations of digital books enrich a scholarly text through overlays and filters that sit on top of the text in order to show additional commentary and feedback. Annotations-in short, a form of readerly or writerly interaction that consists of notes (in any medium) added to texts (of any medium) 1 -already have a long history in a print and manuscript context (e.g., marginalia, errata, rubrics), but the immediacy of two-way discussion between users is a notable feature of digital open annotations, both of comments at the bottom of a text and in-line text annotations. Bertino and Staines therefore liken annotation to a "conversation" between authors and audiences that was previously much less interactive Bertino & Staines, . In addition to this, for Tara McPherson annotations (of e.g., digital visual archives) may also facilitate a more "seamless integration of research materials and scholarly analysis" through a closer presentation between commentary and the object studied (McPherson, ). This is particularly useful in a scholarly communication environment where annotations enable discussions to take place in direct proximity to the material that is under consideration, for example with linguistic markup of text corpora. Open online annotation fulfils several functions that can be beneficial for scholarly communication. Kalir and Garcia summarise the common purposes of annotation quite succinctly: "to provide information, to share commentary, to spark conversation, to express power, and to aid learning" Kalir & Garcia, . Bertino and Staines mention that in addition to enabling collaborations and the opportunity to engage more directly with authors atop of research materials, open annotation allows feedback from readers, corrections and updates, enables inline (open) peer review, augmentation of publications with additional (multimedia) information, connections to related resources, further context around citations, and it offers opportunities within pedagogical settings. 2 They also point out that, beyond human generated annotations, there are also opportunities to enhance content through auto-generated annotations which, as they state, "might include additional information around identifiers, controlled vocabulary, or recommendations" Bertino & Staines, . In this context they explain that there are also opportunities for various semantic applications where the open annotation of documents allows annotations to be "searchable by tags that make it possible to identify the type of annotation or its content" (Bertino & Staines, , Lange, ). In , the World Wide Web Consortium (W C), the standards body for the web,

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“…As Kalir and Garcia note though, the power relations that determine who can and does write annotations and who can't and don't (who gets to annotate) "is bound by social norms, cultural practices, and enforced policies", which needs to be taken into consideration when we think about how we can cultivate participation and interaction around texts, especially within a scholarly communications realm (Kalir and Garcia 2021). This might explain why, as Lyle Skains sets out, notwithstanding several trials in the humanities, annotation as a form of public discourse "has not been a resoundingly successful venture" in these fields (Skains 2020). As Skains outlines, the culture of academia is to blame, which they summarise as "fears about being 'scooped', about blowback, about domineering commenters, and lack of time coalesce to result in extremely poor participation in this emerging form of discourse."…”

Section: Open Annotationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Skains outlines, the culture of academia is to blame, which they summarise as "fears about being 'scooped', about blowback, about domineering commenters, and lack of time coalesce to result in extremely poor participation in this emerging form of discourse." In particular "time, effort, and accessibility" become barriers to participation in this form of academic engagement, especially in a context where annotations usually cannot be cited, which means that in the scholarly reward and reputation system "they offer no verifiable benefit to the contributor in either cultural capital or actual capital" (Skains 2020, Perkel 2015. At the same time, as Skains points out, the issue might have to do more with how publications themselves are perhaps not the best "platforms for interaction" because there is already ubiquitous social media (such as Twitter and mailing lists) on which publications are shared and discussions around them take place (next to our already established print-based environments dedicated to discussing books and research, e.g., conferences and book reviews).…”

Section: Open Annotationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this sense as scholars such as Skains and Faulkes argue, why would scholars duplicate that effort for specific platforms or on specific publications with more restricted audiences, with limited visibility, and with no benefit to their standing or career? (Faulkes 2014, Skains 2020 To ensure annotations are citable research outputs, Bertino and Staines outline how preservation is both crucial and a challenge, as it should include clear practices around "storing annotations, sharing annotations, and reusing annotations." As they explain, certain organisations or knowledge communities would want to host annotations on their own servers (for example in hypothes.is they are by default stored on the hypothes.is servers), which is already being explored by some publishers.…”

Section: Open Annotationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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