Making Sense in the Margins: A Field Study of Annotation

We report on three years of data collected in the field from students in graduate and undergraduate seminars at two universities. The students annotated texts for discussion in classes where hypertext and computer interfaces were core topics. The results of our analysis show how annotation style changes with a combination of experience and study of material related to annotation. Our major conclusions are that there are essentially six purposes for scholarly user-readers to annotate; and support for textual glosses is a necessary part of any successful annotation technology for such use. Our study suggests tools that will be appreciated by e-text users.