Collaborative Annotation Online

As part of an ongoing project, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to make the web better for learning.

Yesterday, I was nostalgically flipping through an old copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, a booklet I’ve had since high school. The summer after our senior year, three friends and I purchased a copy of The Portable Emerson, cut out the Nature chapter with an Xacto knife, and had it bound. A group of amateur philosophers, writers, and artists, our goal was to create something beautiful out of something that had so inspired us. We wanted to collect our disparate views and emotions of this work and share them with each other in an artistic fashion. So we spent the summer passing the booklet around, reading, adding notes in the margins and the white pages we had cleverly added. The artist among us added illustrations; our philosopher included favorite quotes by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (which often had nothing, specifically, to do with the text, but was obviously inspired by something she saw in the pages.) At the end of the summer, the booklet was well loved and worn, and filled not only with margin notes but also with art, tangential thoughts, and the personalities of the four girls who had given pieces of themselves to the work.

Even though I’ve read Nature several times since that summer, I found my friends’ notes inspiring, and not merely because they brought back memories. Their insights did not always mirror my own, and having immediate access to another person’s perceptions, thoughts, and reactions is a valuable part of the learning process. This is why class discussions are so beneficial. Talking things out is helpful. 

Blogs make conversation about a piece of online writing possible: readers can leave messages, ask questions, share information about the work. But in reading deeper, more complex works, I always find this commenting system very limiting. Reading user comments at the end of a work feels tacked on; it doesn’t feel organic the way reading margin notes in a library book does. 

When I’m engaged in an online reading, I want to see relevant user notes contextually. I want to see their thoughts, questions, and links in the place where they make the most sense. Post-reading conversation in the comments is still good and necessary, but as I’m reading, inline margin notes would do wonders for my ability as a learner to absorb, recontextualize, and integrate these other thoughts.

This morning, I stumbled across Clive Thompson’s article on Wired about the future of reading (specifically reading books), and from there found The Golden Notebook Project which attempts to do something similar to what I dreamed up. Seven women read a single book and included their notes on the page – as a reader, I can see the notes immediately instead of having to read them all at once at the end.

I like the approach, but it doesn’t quite go far enough. I want to be able to read someone else’s article, highlight a particular sentence, and link that sentence to another piece of relevant information elsewhere – whether that’s an image, an article, or a video. But unlike a Wiki, I want personalities preserved. I want to see who is making the notes, who is thinking the thoughts. I want my reading of this document both to inform me but also to allow me to explore new relationships. 

It would get messy. For popular reads, it would be impossible. But I still like the idea. I like the possibility.

But what I would like even more would be a central repository where works could be published specifically for collaborative notation and hyperlinking. I want to see works that are creative commons (or which the author has granted permission) to be republished on another website – a virtual library of sorts – where registered users can comment and link. Reader comments and annotations can be rated by other users such that certain comments can be filtered out when they become overwhelming. I think I’d prefer to see comments on mouseover or on-hover rather than on the side of the page – I find that format distracting. But I do think there’s possibility here for learning, for exploration, and for discovering new relationships and resources.

Of course, as with all user generated content, a huge problem would be separating chaff from the wheat, combatting ego monsters, dealing with trolls, and the various other methods people employ to ruin online experiences. So I recognize this pie-in-the-sky collaborative annotation and hyperlinking could be too fantastic for reality. Still, it’s what I want. And maybe if I put it out there, someone can make it happen in a way that works. Who knows? I have faith.