Digital Annotation Research Articles

Addressing Design Challenges When Integrating Machine Learning with a Digital Annotation System to Examine Student Proportional Reasoning

Addressing Design Challenges When Integrating Machine Learning with a Digital Annotation System to Examine Student Proportional Reasoning

Social annotation and dialogic teaching and learning in English language arts

AbstractThis research study explores the role of social annotation in supporting dialogic teaching in secondary English language arts. Grounded in Bakhtin's dialogism and building upon research into online discussion, this study describes how a high school English teacher and her students used a digital annotation tool to read and talk about texts. Analyzing student annotations based on discourse features associated with comprehension and high‐level thinking, the study examines the extent to which social annotation supports quality dialogue. Findings highlight the need for open‐ended prompts and teacher scaffolding of online discussions, and authors suggest that dialogue enhances comprehension of texts when students go beyond reporting on others' thoughts and instead share their own ideas, connections, and questions about the text.

Embracing mindful reading: leveraging technology to soothe sensory stress

In an increasingly digitized world, technological advancements have transformed information consumption, introducing sensory stress. This review explores mindful reading as a strategy to alleviate this stress and enhance digital reading experiences by integrating technology and mindfulness practices. Mindful reading involves deliberate engagement, derived from mindfulness techniques, offering improved concentration and emotional regulation. Tools like Reader View and digital annotation features can help to reduce sensory strain and enhance readability. Educators play a vital role in supporting mindful reading by providing tailored resources for navigating digital formats and fostering reflective learning approaches. This review calls for further research on this topic to build our understanding of how to create a balanced coexistence between technology and human well-being in reading.

Crafting Compelling Argumentative Writing for Undergraduates: Exploring the Nexus of Digital Annotations, Conversational Agents, and Collaborative Concept Maps

Argumentative writing is a fundamental aspect of undergraduate students’ academic and scientific writing related to critical thinking and problem-solving skills. However, previous studies have shown that students face various difficulties with argumentative writing, such as unclear and illogical ideas, less-structured arguments, and unbalanced interpretation of issues, data, and evidence. This study aims to improve the argumentative writing skills of undergraduate students by integrating computer-supported argumentative writing tools, such as annotation, conversational agents (CAs), and collaborative concept maps, into an online learning management system. Since the study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, these tools can support meaningful learning activities and investigation in argumentative writing. The researchers divided sixty participants into the experimental group ( N = 30) and the control group ( N = 30). The results showed that the experimental group’s writing achievements outperformed the control group, and the three tools effectively improved the five elements of argumentative writing, including claims, grounds, warrants, backings, and rebuttal. Furthermore, a deep analysis found that the number of annotations, valid CAs’ responses, and argument nodes on collaborative concept maps can significantly predict students’ argumentative writing development. Moreover, students perceived that the incorporated tools could effectively improve their argumentative writing skills.

Comparing Net Interactive Document System with Non-Interactive Digital Annotation Approaches

Interactivity is an essential part of learning and development, as it teaches people how to collaborate, communicate respectfully, exchange information, and hone their skills. Social networks and computer games are a few examples of applications that allow interactivity and foster more effective learning environments. However, while technology has enabled the creation of large websites, e-books, and online educational systems, many digital libraries and annotation approaches do not provide users with the opportunity to interact with the material or other readers. Users can only share annotated documents in a standard format through email or other means and they are limited to annotating documents without the ability to ask questions, initiate discussions, or give feedback on the content presented. Additionally, embedding annotation data into a document can disrupt its structure. After conducting extensive research on digital annotation tools that enable interactivity, we stumbled upon a system known as NID (Net Interactive Document). Our thorough examination of NID concludes that it outperforms other digital annotation methods in several ways. This system supports the feedback possibility, where different groups of experts can provide information and insights. Additionally, it allows readers to discuss various materials, leading to continuous content growth and more informative documents. One of the significant advantages of NID is that it enables users to create annotations to any extent without ruining the structure of a document. Moreover, NID uses graphical image addresses that enable users to include relevant images or videos from the internet into a document without infringing on copyright laws. So, NID provides a collaborative environment for readers and knowledge providers, making it a valuable educational tool as well as a means of presenting and improving information. We strongly recommend its use in online educational systems, digital libraries, and nonlearning settings (such as commercial spaces) due to its wide range of interactivity.

Climate Fiction for the Classroom through Ecocriticism and Collaborative Digital Text Annotation

This study took a humanities approach to climate change education, focusing on climate fiction texts in the literature classroom, namely: Barakat Akinsiku’s “The God of the Sea,” Sigrid Marianne Gayangos’s “Galansiyang,” and Jules Hogan’s “Those They Left Behind” from Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, Volume III (2021). This encompassed the Quarter 3, Week 7 literature competency in the DepEd Grade 10 curriculum context. In-depth discussion of the cli-fi texts was made possible through the crafting of a lesson exemplar, writing of discussion questions through an ecocritical lens, and using Collaborative Digital Text Annotation (CDTA) as an evaluative reading tool which engendered student responses to the text and interactions within the CDTA activity. Thematic analysis was used in interpreting the digital text annotations which revealed four different themes: drawing out story elements, connecting the text to the real world, performing evaluative reading, and expressing random reactions under which the students' responses to the cli-fi texts were classified. The researchers recommend using online applications such as Google Docs as digital annotation tools during collaborative classroom reading. Also, literature classroom facilitators should create a concrete reward system to encourage students' enthusiasm during the CDTA activities and to achieve the collaborative aspect of the CDTA. Lastly, other reading strategies for evaluating cli-fi texts must be explored.

The Use of Digital Annotation Tools in Improving Online Public Health Literacy among Youths

The Use of Digital Annotation Tools in Improving Online Public Health Literacy among Youths

I Know Something You Don’t Know: The annotation saga continues…

Over the past 20 years, the biodiversity informatics community has pursued components of the digital annotation landscape with varying degrees of success. We will provide an historical overview of the theory, the advancements made through a few key projects, and will identify some of the ongoing challenges and opportunities. The fundamental principles remain unchanged since annotations were first proposed. Someone (or something): (1) has an enhancement to make elsewhere from the source where original data or information are generated or transcribed; (2) wishes to broadcast these statements to the originator and to others who may benefit; and (3) expects persistence, discoverability, and attribution for their contributions alongside the source. The Filtered Push project (Morris et al. 2013) considered several use cases and pioneered development of services based on the technology of the day. The exchange of data between parties in a universally consistent way necessitated the development of a novel draft standard for data annotations via an extension of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Annotation Working Group standard (Sanderson et al. 2013) to be sufficiently informative for a data curator to confidently make a decision. Figure 2 from Morris et al. (2013), reproduced here as Fig. 1, outlines the composition of an annotation data package for a taxonomic identification. The package contains the data object(s) associated with an occurrence, an expression of the motivation(s) for updating, some evidence for an assertion, and a stated expectation for how the receiving entity should take action. The Filtered Push and Annosys (Tschöpe et al. 2013) projects also considered implementation strategies involving collection management systems (e.g., Symbiota) and portals (e.g., European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy, EDIT). However, there remain technological barriers for these systems to operate at scale, the least of which is the absence of globally unique, persistent, resolvable identifiers for shared objects and concepts. Major aggregation infrastructures like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) rely on data enhancement to improve the quality of their resources and have annotation services in their work plans. More recently, the Digital Extended Specimen (DES) concept (Hardisty et al. 2022) will rely on annotation services as key components of the proposed infrastructure. Recent work on annotation services more generally has considered various new forms of packaging and delivery such as Frictionless Data (Fowler et al. 2018), Journal Article Tag Suite XML (Agosti et al. 2022), or nanopublications (Kuhn et al. 2018). There is risk in fragmentation of this landscape and disenfranchisement of both biological collections and the wider research community if we fail to align the purpose, content, and structure of these packages or if these fail to remain aligned with FAIR principles. Institutional collection management systems currently represent the canonical data store that provides data to researchers and data aggregators. It is critical that information and/or feedback about the data they release be round-tripped back to them for consideration. However, the sheer volume of annotations that could be generated by both human and machine curation processes will overwhelm local data curators and the systems supporting them. One solution to this is to create a central annotation store with write and discovery services that best support the needs of all stewards of data. This will require an international consortium of parties with a governance and technical model to assure its sustainability.

How do elementary students read poetry together? Elementary students’ reading practices using digital annotations

The Zoom platform provided students in recent online classes, which had been necessitated by COVID-19, with opportunities for active expression using digital annotations. This study explores the experience of elementary students reading poetry using digital annotations and its usefulness as social constructivist reading. As such, we conducted a case study of an out-of-school literature class that used Zoom annotations, and collected data through participatory observation, activity materials, and interviews from 16 participating students. The data were analyzed by coding and categorizing common themes in two processes—annotation generating and sharing. We found that the digital annotations facilitated students’ comprehension of challenging texts. They shared their thoughts and reflected on each other’s opinions while generating and sharing annotations and socially constructing their appreciation. Digital annotations are significant in that they reveal the cooperative reading processes of students transparently, and they allow social annotations in literature classes in accordance with the interests and needs of the elementary students.

Abstract 4321: Clinical-grade early detection of esophageal cancer on data from a non-endoscopic device using deep learning

Abstract Aim: Our goal was to evaluate a novel deep learning system for integrated human-AI review of whole-slide images (WSIs) from the Cytosponge to predict progression from Barrett's esophagus (BE) to esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC). Background: Fewer than 1% of BE patients advance to EAC, therefore delineating the patients at elevated risk is crucial for prioritizing their surveillance and treatment. Previous work has shown that the Cytosponge, a non-endoscopic test, coupled with biomarkers (TFF3, atypia, p53) can be used to identify and risk-stratify individuals with BE. However, the Cytosponge workflow to date has required a time consuming pathology review. Methods: We collected 1,700 BE Cytosponge WSIs from over 800 patients. We hand-drew over 30,000 digital annotations on the WSIs, a 300-hour collaborative effort between a computer scientist and 4 pathologists. Using these data for training, validation, and testing, we developed a deep learning system to determine whether cellular atypia and/or p53 overexpression is present. We used this system in a machine-assisted (MA) review process to highlight the most diagnostically interesting regions of WSIs for pathologist review. In our proposed system, patients are automatically triaged into high or low confidence positive, and high confidence negative classes for both atypia and p53 status, and only low confidence cases are sent for MA review. Results: Out of 23 architectures, the best atypia model achieves an accuracy of 0.90, and the best p53 model 0.96. The model was concordant with pathologists in 342/425 (80.5%) validation and 301/330 (91.2%) test-set patients. The system also identified 83 validation cases with atypia and/or p53 that were not previously reported by the pathologists. Of these, 29 (35%) were confirmed abnormal with the ground truth endoscopy biopsies (11 high grade dysplasia or intramucosal carcinoma, 14 low grade dysplasia, 5 indefinite for dysplasia). In the test set 29 results were discordant with pathology including 6 (21%) confirmed abnormal on endoscopy biopsies (3 HGD/IMC, 2 LGD, 1 IND). We used the models’ outputs to localize where these “missed” regions lie in the WSIs, and pathologist MA review confirmed the presence of focal abnormalities (cellular atypia +/- p53 aberrance) correctly identified by the algorithm. If pathologists only review cases for which the model had low confidence, this preserves overall performance while reducing pathologist workload over twenty-fold. MA review on the remaining WSIs is 4.7 times faster than standard review for atypia screening and 16.0 times faster for p53. Conclusion: This work shows the potential of an integrated human-AI WSI review process to drastically expedite a time consuming task and improve on pathologist performance when abnormal regions are easy for human eyes to miss. This work therefore lays the groundwork for similar machine-doctor approaches in other areas of medicine. Citation Format: Adam G. Berman, Ahmad Miremadi, Maria O'Donovan, Shalini Malhotra, Monika Tripathi, Rebecca C. Fitzgerald, Florian Markowetz. Clinical-grade early detection of esophageal cancer on data from a non-endoscopic device using deep learning. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 4321.

Content and quantity of highlights and annotations predict learning from multiple digital texts

Learning from multiple texts is an essential yet challenging academic task. Thus, a persistent need in the field is identifying those strategies that will support students' learning from multiple texts, and facilitating their use. In this study, we adopt a quasi-experimental design to examine how the use of digital annotations, allowing undergraduates (N = 278) to identify and, potentially, link important concepts across texts, can be used to foster learning from multiple texts. Additionally, we examine students' digital highlights and annotations under four different strategy conditions, assigned to elicit different forms of processing found to be effective in prior work. These conditions included asking students to highlight and annotate (a) important or relevant information in texts, (b) connections or links across texts (i.e., intertextual reasoning condition), (c) information in texts facilitating evaluation, and (d) difficult to understand information (i.e., metacognitive monitoring condition). Some differences were found in students' rendering of highlights and annotations across strategy conditions, however, no differences in multiple text comprehension and integration performance were found across strategy conditions. Still, membership in the metacognitive monitoring strategy condition, relative to the relevance condition, as well as students’ highlighting of information supporting evaluation (i.e., source information, statistical evidence), and accessing of references during reading were predictive of multiple text comprehension and integration. Thus, this study contributes to theory by providing further evidence of strategies (e.g., metacognitive monitoring, evaluation) supportive of multiple text learning and introduces a promising means whereby such strategy use may be fostered.

İstanbul Street Rhythms: A Field Guide to Short Expressive Ensembles

This article presents the field guide as an alternate format to the anthology in documenting short literary expressions. Anthologies often isolate, collect, and remove literary forms from their habitats by representing them in a book, altering the context by which short literary expressions can be interpreted. After the Gezi Park protests in İstanbul in 2013, several print and electronic anthologies documented public expressions, yet these books offer no or only vague mention of location. Through Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis: Space Time and Everyday Life, I emphasize the rhythms of the street that are interrupted by public expressions. After a review of Lefebvre’s work on rhythms, I offer digital annotation techniques to map the material and medium of public inscriptions of one neighborhood of Kadıköy, İstanbul called Rasimpaşa, a district historically called “Yeldeğirmeni” or “The Windmill.” The focus on public graffiti, street art, posters, signs, stickers, or other verbal traces in public space allows for an expansion of the concept of “short literature” to include their lived habitats as rhythmic ensembles.

Stay off my field: policing boundaries in human rights and democracy promotion

AbstractThe study of global politics is frequently organized around fields, but the boundaries of these fields are little understood. We explore the relationship between two proximate fields, human rights (HR) and democracy promotion (DP), in order to understand the emergence and maintenance of field boundaries. The two fields are closely linked in international law and practice, yet they have remained largely separate as fields of action, despite vast changes in global politics over four decades. The disjuncture has been largely maintained by HR organizations who police the boundary to keep DP out. We identify differences in anchoring norms as the key factor driving boundary maintenance. Actors in the two fields hold different foundational ideas about how to protect and advance rights, norms that we describe as cosmopolitan and statist. This account is superior to alternate explanations that emphasize functional demands or resource flows, and complements historical institutionalist accounts. Our research offers a theoretical contribution to the study of fields and practical insight into two important areas of global practice. Our qualitative research is supplemented by digital annotations, supported by the Qualitative Data Repository.

Using colour-coded digital annotation for enhanced case-based learning outcomes

ABSTRACT Business cases are commonly adopted into the accounting curricula to promote deep learning. However, in practice, case-based learning is often ineffective without facilitation because of accounting students’ strong surface-learning tendencies. This study investigates the case-based learning effect of colour-coded digital annotation (CCDA). CCDA requires students to highlight web-based text using prescribed colours and present case responses as annotated comments. Our findings indicate that students who adopt CCDA achieve greater improvement in case assessments. Consistent with findings in the technology-enhanced literature (TEL), CCDA provides greater benefits for students who engage more with the intervention. However, CCDA’s effect on learning outcomes is not correlated with the self-reported learning experience. This study contributes to the literature and practice by presenting a cost-effective intervention to operationalise case-based learning in accounting education.

Coreading Middlemarch in Pandemic Times: Using Digital Humanities to Build Community at a Distance

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a need for new practices of asynchronous reading that generate community. For the University of Washington's Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Research Cluster's 150th Anniversary Middlemarch Symposium, we created a digital edition of Middlemarch through Manifold, a digital humanities tool for e-editions, designed to encourage a practice we call “coreading.” By using digital annotation tools to build open communities of inquiry and crowd-sourced forms of knowledge, this practice decenters traditional forms of scholarship. Coreading allows us to explore the attachments that we form with literature—the affective, the personal and interpersonal, and the intellectual. In our explication of the Manifold Middlemarch project, we discuss the successes and setbacks of this collaborative community engagement, considering the question of what community and collaboration look like under pandemic circumstances, how digital humanities 2.0 projects can help us respond, and how coreading works as a solution for connection in unconnected times.

Coreading Middlemarch in Pandemic Times: Using Digital Humanities to Build Community at a Distance

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a need for new practices of asynchronous reading that generate community. For the University of Washington's Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Research Cluster's 150th Anniversary Middlemarch Symposium, we created a digital edition of Middlemarch through Manifold, a digital humanities tool for e-editions, designed to encourage a practice we call “coreading.” By using digital annotation tools to build open communities of inquiry and crowd-sourced forms of knowledge, this practice decenters traditional forms of scholarship. Coreading allows us to explore the attachments that we form with literature—the affective, the personal and interpersonal, and the intellectual. In our explication of the Manifold Middlemarch project, we discuss the successes and setbacks of this collaborative community engagement, considering the question of what community and collaboration look like under pandemic circumstances, how digital humanities 2.0 projects can help us respond, and how coreading works as a solution for connection in unconnected times.

Transit Zones, Locales, and Locations: How Digital Annotations Affect Communication in Public Places

The article presents an analytical concept, the Constitution of Accessibility through Meaning of Public Places (CAMPP) model. The CAMPP model distinguishes different manifestations of public places according to how they facilitate and restrict communication between urbanites. It describes public places along two analytical dimensions: their degree of perceived accessibility and the elaboration of knowledge necessary to participate in place-related activities. Three patterns of communicative interaction result from these dimensions: civil inattention, small talk, and sociability. We employ the CAMPP model as an analytical tool to investigate how digital annotations affect communicative patterns and perceptions of accessibility of public places. Based on empirical observations and interviews with users of smartphone apps that provide digital annotations, such as Foursquare City Guide, we observe that digital annotations tend to reflect and reinforce existing patterns of communication and rarely evoke changes in the perceived accessibility of public places.

Encountering unnatural E-literature: tracing interpretation and relationality across multimodal response and digital annotation

ABSTRACT The emergence of e-literature – texts created on and for digital devices – has coincided with innovative, transgressive methods of storytelling. Pry, an iOS-based text, exemplifies e-literature’s potential to rethink traditional narrative conventions. Rather than depict the real-world as we experience it (i.e. mimesis), Pry features metaleptic elements (i.e. jarring transgressions across narrative levels) and unnatural temporality (i.e. nonlinear, contradictory jumps across time). This article traces how a graduate class of librarians and preservice teachers responded to Pry’s unnatural narratology through multimodal composition and annotation. Findings suggest that e-literature may demand more expansive repertoires of text interpretation and relationality.

Exploring annotations for musical pattern discovery gathered with digital annotation tools

The study of inter-annotator agreement in musical pattern annotations has gained increased attention over the past few years. While expert annotations are often taken as the reference for evaluating pattern discovery algorithms, relying on just one reference is not usually sufficient to capture the complex musical relations between patterns. In this paper, we address the potential of digital annotation tools to enable large-scale annotations of musical patterns, by comparing datasets gathered with two recently developed digital tools. We investigate the influence of the tools and different annotator backgrounds on the annotation process by performing inter-annotator agreement analysis and feature-based analysis on the annotated patterns. We discuss implications for further adaptation of annotation tools, and the potential for deriving reference data from such rich annotation datasets for the evaluation of automatic pattern discovery algorithms in the future.

The Affordances of Digital Social Reading for EFL Learners

The goal of this study is to illustrate the affordances mediated by digital socio-literacy practices of university-level EFL learners engaging in collaborative reading of texts from an ecological perspective. For this purpose, a total of 38 first-year undergraduate students taking a compulsory EFL course in Turkey participated in the research. Data collected from learners' digital annotations on a digital annotation tool (DAT) and reflective papers were qualitatively analyzed. As a result, the construct of affordance was operationalized in an EFL digital social reading context through indicators derived from learners' annotations. The findings based on student-reported data showed that digital collaborative reading practices had contextual, social, and linguistic affordances for EFL learners. Following the discussion of the findings, the study invites future research to examine L2 learners' practices in a DAT-mediated environment in relation to affordances for specific language areas such as grammar and writing.