Annotations and Hypertrails with Spreadcrumbs - An Easy Way to Annotate, Refind and Share

Annotations have been shown to be an important activity during reading, especially during “active reading”. Annotations support understanding, interpretation, sensemaking and scannability. As valuable as in paperbased contexts, digital online annotations provide several benefits for annotators and collaborators. To study the impact of these benefits we present in this paper SpreadCrumbs, a straightforward Web annotation tool. SpreadCrumbs offers simple annotation’s interactions and metaphors that support most of the users’ annotations needs in the digital environment by enhancing the web experience with “in-context” annotations and providing a unique form of social navigation support with hypertrails. The results of our studies with the tool show the importance of annotations, the empirical outperformance of “in-context” annotations over other methods, and the outcome benefits of supporting social navigation.