TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Digital Annotation: A Revolution in the Making?

By Jon Noring

David Rothman’s recent blog article on annotating digital content is informative and provides an end-user’s perspective of how it all might work in practice. But, in my view, David does not go far enough in presenting the case as to why annotation of digital content may be a revolution in the making — the Bigger Picture™, if you will.

The relentless push to digitize all types of content is opening up many interesting avenues to make content much more useful to everyone — to more completely integrate digital content into the daily fabric of life and culture. Not only this, but the digital revolution also makes it easier for anyone to become a content creator and distributor, rather than just a content consumer. Witness the recent rise of blogs and blog comment areas, such as the TeleRead blog. No longer are the keys to content creation and distribution held by relatively few who can afford it (some have called them the “power elite”), who for millenia have acted as gatekeepers on the content the masses may see and hear.

Many people not only yearn to themselves become original content creators — which they can now do so quite easily (and it will only get easier as digital content creation tools and distribution channels continue to improve) — they also want to share their thoughts, feelings and knowledge on other people’s content that interests them. People are natural critics, and in essence the fundamental fabric of society is enabled and stabilized by knowledge and opinion sharing. As philosophized in the book of Hosea in the Bible: “My people perish for lack of knowledge.”

This is why I believe that the digital annotation of content will soon become a Big Thing™, possibly being as big as blogs are today.

Let’s now look at what is a digital annotation, and some brief commentary on the need for an open standard annotation format.

What is a digital annotation?

A digital annotation is essentially a stand-alone digital object whose purpose is to provide commentary on another digital object (or some portion within the digital object.) The target digital object itself can be one of a number of things: digital publication (e.g., an e-book), web page (such as a blog article like this one), image, audio, video, and even another annotation (since a digital annotation is itself a digital object!)

Unlike the physical realm of ink-on-paper, it is possible to digitally annotate content “from a distance” without fear of harming or altering the target content since each annotation can itself be a stand-alone digital object with a pointer to (and into) the target object. Imagine trying to directly annotate paper books in a traditional library — if the librarian catches you doing this — your day will suddenly turn quite unpleasant!

Why we need an open standard annotation format

An exhaustive explanation as to why we need a common, open standard annotation format is not necessary since it borders on the obvious. Where would the World Wide Web be if HTML were proprietary? But let me present three general reasons:

1. A common format allows interoperable tools (including open source) to be developed to enable the creation, editing, processing and presentation of annotations.

2. A common format makes it much easier to build and maintain annotation repositories.

   Imagine a digital repository with billions of annotations of the world’s digital content!

3. An open standard format assures that no proprietary interest will control the standard, and thus threaten to place business interests above the interests of the world-at-large. Applications important to our social fabric, as digital annotations clearly are, must be based on open standards.

Naturally, a major driver in the “under-the-hood” structure of the digital annotation format is what information the annotation digital object must contain, and how that information is to be organized. This ultimately depends on the aggregate requirements of all the “stakeholders” who will create, edit, process, use and archive annotations. This includes authors (who may wish to annotate their own published content), users of content, publishers, distributors/retailers, librarians and archivists, the accessibility community (annotations must be accessible!), applications developers, and others.

What might the annotation format be based upon? As David noted in his blog article, the Annotea annotation format is intriguing as a starting point to build upon. The Annotea format conforms with W3C’s RDF, the “Resource Description Framework,” one component of the Semantic Web activity.) And of course there’s a lot to learn from the wiki model.

Let me know if you are interested in an open standard annotation format, and certainly feel welcome to submit, as comments to this article, what you deem are requirements for the design of the format.

Update: I’ve just posted a TeleRead blog article which expands the concept of annotation to also include “time and place happenings” — “Annotating Life.”