The big conversation: open annotation in manuscripts and the web

Editor's Notes

• #2: A talk about glosses, footnotes, and how they looked before during and after the tyranny of printing.Will talk about what annotations are used for and who creates themWill look at ways annotation have been done in mediaeval times and how that changed with the introduction of the printing press.We’ll then look at new uses for annotations in computer applications in general, and in the early days of the web.Lastly, we’ll look at current developments in web annotation and how that affects designers. This last bit will likely get very confusing so there won’t be any clear conclusions, but some trends and challenges will be identified.
• #3: Proper stories, like good presentations, need a beginning, a middle and an end.
• #5: Harley MS 3487, Aristotle's Physics, with commentaries http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=harley_ms_3487_f022v3rd quarter of the 13th century, The manuscript includes Aristotle, LibriNaturales (corpus vetustius), with glosses:Physica (ff. 4r-65v);De coelo et mundo (ff. 65v-121r);De generatione (ff. 121v-140v);Meteora, appended with Avicenna, De mineralibus (ff. 140v-173r);De anima (ff. 173r-197r);De memoria et reminiscentia (ff. 197r-200r);De vita et morte (ff. 200r-202r);Pseudo-Aristotle, De differentia spiritus et animae (ff. 202r-208r);De somno et vigilia (ff. 208r-216r); De sensu et sensato (ff. 216r-224r);Nicholas of Damascus, De plantis (ff. 224r-235v).Decoration:29 historiated initials in colours and gold, with animated extensions or partial bar borders, and pen-flourishing in gold, red and blue (ff. 4r, 4v, 10r, 16v, 22v, 34r, 39v, 47v, 52r, 65v, 103v, 116r, 121v, 140v, 145r, 152r, 161r, 173r, 180r, 191r, 197r, 200r, 202r, 202v, 208r, 211v, 214v, 216r, 224r).Initials in red with pen-flourishing in red, and blue. Running headers in blue, and red and sometimes gold, with penwork decoration, some in the form of heads. Paraphs in blue. Rubrics in while, red, or blue. Marginal diagrams in red, brown, and blue, with green and blue, and sometimes yellow washes (ff. 69r, 69v, 70v, 76v, 90r, 90v, 92v). Marginal drawing of an animal, in colours (f. 142v). Sketches for the illuminator (ff. 16v, 22r, 34r, 52r, 103v, 116r, 140v, 152r, 161r, 173r, 180r, 191r, 197r, 200r, 202v, 202r, 208r, 211v, 214v, 216r, 224r).The illuminations are attributed to the Glazier Bible group. Other manuscript attributed to the same workshop or artist are Organon, Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 193; Averroes, Commentary on Aristotle, Methaphisica, Oxford, Merton College, MS 269 (see Camille 1985); and Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee. 2. 31 (see Morgan 1988).Aristotle's Physica with marginal gloses in two or three columns.Decoration:9 historiated initials in gold and colours at the beginning of books.f. 4r (book I: preface): initial Q(uoniam) of burning of books before a friar and a seated king. Below, a small miniature of a sleeping man and a fish. Marginal decoration includes two fighting men, two lions and a lion cub, and a man confronting a lion.f. 4v (book I): initial 'P'(rincipium) of a man fighting with an animal.f. 10r (book II): initial 'E'(orum) of a scholar looking at animals below him. f. 16v (book III): initial 'Q'(uoniam) of a personification of Nature: a crowned woman holding a fleur de lis. A man playing a harp in the margin. f. 22v (book IV): initial 'S'(imiliter) of a seated scholar looking at the celestial bodies above him. f. 34r (book V): initial 'T'(ransmutatur) of two wrestlers. f. 39v (book VI): initial 'S'(i) of a scholar counting four horizontal poles (spatial magnitudes). f. 47v (book VII): initial 'O'(mne) of two scholars disputing.f. 52r (book VIII): initial 'U'(trum) of Christ holding the orb of the world divided in three parts.
• #6: Or we can use the space between the lines
• #7: Kinds of conversation includes the undercutting, an annotation that is an image – both here, counterpointing the philosopher exploring the boundaries of knowledge with the idiot representing the rest of us.
• #8: References rather than conversationIndustrialised broadcast communication: exclusion of the reader and the scribeGeneva Bible
• #9: This all coalesced pretty quickly. By the end of the fifteenth century today’s way of keying matter outside the main text to the text was established, the range of annotations reduced. Margins of books became places to rest your thumbs rather than places in which conduct debate with the author.
• #10: Michael Twyman’s book Colour Lithography, page design by RobBanham
• #11: Pre-publication (but ‘publication’ getting very fuzzy as a concept. The ‘public peer review’)
• #12: PDF commenting preserves the original and adds pictures of paper as overlays
• #13: Though clearly designed by engineers, Microsoft Word’s notes functions do treat the document as an living, evolving, thing and introduces comments and discussions about comments which are actually part of the document lifecycle.
• #14: http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2014/03/31/daily-mail-headlines-replaced-with-user-comments/
• #15: In HTML, there’s machinery available. Very conservative Wikipedia
• #18: epub – starting to get past refekecting print. (an Apple iBook)
• #24: The Waste Land again, this time in an e-pub 3 ebook. Notes are private
• #25: Kindle Mac user annotation.
• #26: Notes made in Kindle are stored centrally so available on any device that you use and can be viewed all together. An advance on the generic e-book standard but proprietary.
• #27: Medium now has contextual commenting. Neat (but proprietary). V quiet signal that something else there.
• #28: Medium commenting stream. Neat. But
• #30: What you can do with the visual behaviour of annotations depends on what ‘handles’ the behind-screen code gives you and what styling tools allow you to do with them.
• #31: A open annotation
• #32: Open standard for referencing: RDF AO annotation ontologyIdentifying what the reference points to: CFI eg book.epub#epubcfi(/6/4[chap01ref]!/4[body01]/10[para05]/3:10) – multiple media
• #33: First open annotation service announced by Mozilla in 1993 with many of the features now being explored by startups and academic research.
• #35: openphilosophy.org project of the Open Knowledge Foundation, funded by the UK’s JISC
• #37: Startung to work on standards basis, some way to go on design interfaces
• #38: Rap Genius has a series of site which offer annotation. This one of rap lyrics, containing most of the elements of a good annotation system. identity, disputation, reputation…
• #39: Annotator.js from Open Knowledge Foundation
• #40: CHARMe open annotation of climate data at University of Reading. Good open data model, visual design is closed, specific. What should an annotation look like? There is no genre for this sort of thing.