The Susan Burney Letters Project

About the Project: Annotation

Why annotate?
Firstly, annotation complements the process of digitisation, especially when digitisation involves transcription. The painstaking, meticulous process of transcribing and cataloguing large tracts of text presents a 'once-only' opportunity to enhance texts through annotation. In comparison to separate transcribing and annotating, the combining of these two activities presents significant cost savings.

Moreover, and secondly, annotation is highly appropriate to transcribed historical texts. This is especially so for texts which, though specialist, offer much for inter and cross-disciplinary study. A prime example of specialist texts where annotation provides a key route to their rich value to researchers across the Humanities disciplines is the Susan Burney letters.

Thirdly, annotation is appropriate for electronic transcription given that new technologies hold out much promise for developing both annotation techniques and the use-value of annotation:

• Electronic annotation can be thought of as a hybrid form combining commentary and navigation; it brings together traditional footnotes, endnotes and index. For example, an annotation for a place or person can be accessible from instances of the place or person's name within the body of the text (i.e. accessible from every instance of the place or person's name), or accessible by searching through annotation entries.
• Electronic annotation offers the potential for fully customisable annotation. For example, where the end-user of an electronic edition can select themed annotation, such as 'only show annotations relevant to 1790-1795'. Moreover, the user could switch annotations 'on' and 'off' to suit reading purposes.
• Through the use of annotation to non-text resources, electronic annotation also offers the potential to enhance the visualisation of texts. For example, place names within a text can link through to a map, which then links back to relevant sections of the text. As such, a clickable map can provide geographic associations within a text.

Implementation
Although all of the above annotation techniques and devices are feasible with available technology (e.g. XML and DTD schema, Internet map server and database integration) a lack of agreed user-conventions for annotation provides, however, a significant issue for implementation. For example, easily understandable mechanisms for navigation between annotations and the main body of text have yet to be fully developed. This pilot web site uses conventional hyperlink anchors which take the reader from highlighted words to footnote style annotations (and then provide links back to the main body of the text). An alternative system would be the use of pop-up windows. Developing an annotation methodology, especially through collaboraion with others engaged on similiar projects, is one of the main areas for further development of this pilot web site.

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