No source: created in electronic format.
The Complutense University has been one of the first European universities that
has collaborated with Google’s project
@Note 1.0 allows us to retrieve digitized works from Google Books collection and add annotations to enrich the texts with research and learning purposes: critical editions, reading activities, e-learning tasks, etc. One of the main features of @Note annotation model, which distinguishes it from similar approaches (Azouaou & Desmoulins 2006; Bechhofer at al. 2002; Koivunen 2005; Rios da Rocha et al. 2009; Schroeter et al. 2006; Tazi et al. 2003), is to promote the collaborative creation of annotation schemas by communities of researchers, teachers and students, and the use of these schemas in the definition of annotation activities on literary works. It results in a very flexible and adaptive model, able to be used by many different communities of experts in literature defending different critical literary theories and for different annotation tasks. In this paper we present this annotation model.
The structure of the @Note annotation model is summarized in the UML class diagram (Booch et al. 2005) of Fig. 1. In this model:
The @Note annotation process governs how to create the different types of information elements envisioned in the annotation model. For this purpose, @Note introduces a set of rules governing aspects like information visibility, creation and modification privileges of annotations and annotation schemas, etc. Although, by lack of space, these rules will not be detailed here, in Fig. 2 we include an example concerning an informal description of some of the rules governing the management of annotation schemas.
Annotation schemas in @Note are seen as T-boxes of
description logic theories (Brachman & Levesque 2004). For instance, Fig 3a
shows, edited in @Note, a fragment of the annotation schema used at UCM in an
English Literature introductory course, while Fig 3b despites the description
logic’s counterpart. This simple interpretation is still powerful-enough to
enable powerful annotation browsing and annotation recovering behavior. Indeed:
In both cases, since entailment will be performed according to the description
logic principles, the process will take into account the is-a
relationship made explicit by the annotation schema.
The system has been entirely developed using Google technologies for the development of Rich-Internet Applications (RIAs) (Fraternali et al. 2010): GWT in the client side and the Google App Engine’s facilities in the server side (Unruh 2010). Fig. 4 shows some snapshots of the system. The current version runs on the fully free-access books integrated in Google Books, and, in particular, on the UCM-Google collection. The works retrieval is achieved by the use of the Google Books API through REST (Richardson & Ruby 2007), and then presented to clients in an asynchronous way to keep them responsive to their events.
@Note promotes a fully collaborative annotation process, in which not only literary works are collaboratively annotated, but also annotation schemas are collaboratively created. The @Note system has been evaluated at UCM by several researchers and students in literature. They highlighted the flexibility of the annotation model, and, in particular, the ability to create and share annotation schemas tailored according to different critical perspectives and annotation activities. Additionally, they appreciate a sufficient expressive power from a browsing and recovering point of view. They also remarked the educational potential of the tool, although some advanced features could add some conceptual difficulties for students.
Currently we are working to adapt the annotation tool in order to facilitate its
connection to a repository of learning objects, so as to allow the storage of
literary texts’ annotations as learning objects (Polsani 2003), and to make
possible the recovery of those annotations and move about them according to the
associated metadata. Thus, we are developing a communal working space for the
creation of written compositions in different traditions and languages. We are
also experimenting with the students’ capability for developing their own
catalogues, annotating the literary texts according to them and reusing their
annotations in the production of critical essays. Additionally, we are working
on connecting our system with other digital libraries (in particular, with Hathi
Trust
Acknowledgements
This work has been funded by Google with a grant of the
Google’s 2010 Digital Humanities award program entitled Collaborative annotation of digitalized literary texts. Additionally, this
work has been performed in the context of the project grants of the Spanish Ministry
for Research and Innovation (FF12008-06924-C02-01 and TIN2010-21288-C02-01), UCM
(PIMCDs 2010/177 and 2011/313) and Santander-UCM (GR 42/10 - 962022).
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