John Bradley has been a member of the Department of Digital Humanities (formally Center for Computing in the Humanities), King’s College London since 1997, where he has worked on many multi-year collaborative research projects, carried out his own research, and taught in various programs offered by the department. In September 2011 he was appointed into an academic post at King’s, and still finds himself sometimes trying to figure out that this means.
Born Digital
Digital technology often gives us the chance to re-conceive common scholarly practices with the humanities, and one of these is the practice of annotation. Whereas many in the digital humanities look at annotation through the lens of social media, in this paper we consider annotation’s already established function in scholarship: to support the development of an interpretation of a body of material. It begins by applying a “software application” perspective to annotation and it notes that personal annotation sits at the nexus between the publishing application of the material being annotated, and an interpretation development application that aims to support the reader’s thinking. Once this application orientation is taken up, it becomes evident that it is useful to re-conceptualise aspects of annotation beyond the annotation-of-media focus which the World Wide Web has encouraged in all of us. The paper does this by considering annotation in an application that is not media oriented in nature, Northwestern University’s WordHoard, and it explores some of the significance of annotation where the application’s data model – with its inherent semantic significance – is available to be annotated. There is a growing interest in thinking of the WWW as a delivery mechanism for software applications rather than merely for documents, and thus many of the issues that this paper raises could apply to the work of web-oriented developers too.
An application-oriented perspective opens up new ways to think about digital annotation.
One characteristic of new technology is that it takes time to understand all the new affordances the technology provides. The earliest printers tried first to produce books that looked as much like manuscripts as possible but later discovered that print had both possibilities and requirements that were not conceived of in the pre-print era. The digital revolution, particularly the internet, has brought us the evident potential for a substantial transformation in scholarly communication. Goodness knows, we in the digital humanities (DH) are well aware that the new digital technologies in which we are engaged are bringing new things to the Humanities! However, it is possible – even likely – that we are still not seeing all the new kinds of potential that digital technology has opened to us.
My work has taken up issues around digital annotation, and this is a topic that is of
interest to a number of people in the digital humanities. Indeed, there is an active
community of researchers in the DH who are exploring the annotation of digital
resources such as WWW pages. Drew University's DM project is described by its
developers as a tool for linking media,
and supports the annotation of images,
texts and fragments of images or texts a system for annotation and
linkage of sources in the Arts and Humanities
that allows the annotation and
linkage of arbitrary digital sources such as digital texts, still and moving images
and sound
a web-based tool
for creating and editing image-based electronic editions and digital archives of
humanities texts
annotate regions of an image.
The Open Annotation
Collaboration recognises that annotating is
a pervasive element of scholarly practice for both the humanist and the scientist,
and that it is a method by which scholars organize existing knowledge and
facilitate the creation and sharing of new knowledge
Almost all of the interest in digital annotation with our community has been from the
perspective of the WWW, in particular in the context of Web 2.0: its public and
social context. See, for example, Jane Hunter's excellent encyclopaedic overview of
work on digital annotation in the web context
Much of our understanding of annotation within the WWW has grown out of work in the
context of web-accessible digital libraries. For this, the highly influential work
of Maristella Agnosti and colleagues and, in particular, her seminal work on a formal
definition of annotation as presented in Angosti and Ferro has been important facilitate to emergence of a Web and resource-centric
interoperable annotation environment
This way of viewing annotation – in the light of the WWW – is seductive not only
because of the pervasive nature of the WWW in our thinking about digital things, but
also because the continuing document-oriented nature of much of the web. As this
paper will hopefully reveal, this document-orientation happens to fit well with
characteristics of pre-digital technologies such as print, and means that we don't
see other aspects of digital objects that are
I intend in this paper, then, to encourage a somewhat broader perspective, derived
from my work on the
Because of the fascination within the DH community with the WWW we as a community
have chosen to focus on the new potentially highly collaborative and community
nature of scholarship that the WWW makes possible. Indeed, much recent work
focuses so tightly on collaboration that it seems to ignores the role of
individual reflection in scholarship. We see, for instance, the well-deserved
excitement within the DH community generated by the emergence of the Zotero
software developed by Georgetown's Center for History and New Media the tool connects with the
digital ecosystem
Building Bridges, Not Islands.
However, this is a telling statement – surely the islands are important too. The
bridges are only needed if the islands contain something of importance. What
would the islands be in humanities scholarship?
In spite of this excitement in building bridges of collaboration and digital
sharing, surely all social scholarly interaction had better be driven by the
Pliny (2009) was software written to explore some of the new potential for
annotation in the digital world and was created to focus attention on the
potential role for computing in supporting not so much social scholarly
interaction but personal research. Current work by this author with colleagues
here at King's is now focusing on the implications of sharing of Pliny-based
personal data in the computing
What is meant, within Pliny, about annotation for personal research? The primary
starting point for understanding annotation there is to think about traditional
pre-digital annotation: some material added by the reader to a printed text for
the purpose of enriching the reader’s experience of reading that text. In fact,
Pliny is derived from thinking about what writing in a book is for, and to
explore how doing this kind of annotation in a digital instead of print context
affects or enhances this goal or purpose. At first glance one might think that,
after all, dimensions of annotation
) – in particular the
dimensions of published vs. private
and Global vs. institutional vs.
workgroup vs. personal
, and further discussion on the distinction
between private and public annotation, and what happens when going from private
notes to public ones in Marshall and Brush 2004.
Since even in the Web 2.0 context much of the thinking about annotation is
derived from the long-standing practice of annotation on paper, let us start
there (see figure 1). Most of the time annotation on paper is a personal
activity – what Marshall would consider at the private end of her published
Thus, when the book reader writes a note on the page s/he creates a situation
where two rather different applications must co-exist there: the
print media represented by the printed word and his/her annotation shown by the
handwritten note. The owner, the technology and purpose of these two co-existing
texts – the annotation and the print material – are quite different.
Furthermore, there is a temporal side to this: whereas the printed text
represents an endpoint in the
In some senses, then, a printed page with an annotation on it represents both a physical and temporal nexus between these two quite different applications: (i) the presentation of the print, and (ii) the support for the annotation made by the individual reader. Although the annotation is on the same page as the print, it is quite a separate kind of thing from the print. Indeed, if handwritten annotation on a printed page worked in the way that many annotation services on websites operate – provided as a service of the book’s publisher – it would in fact seem very peculiar, and, indeed perhaps strikingly inappropriate. Why should personal notes attached to material served via a website be made available through facilities provided by the website's owner, and thus apparently owned by him or her? The ownership of the individual printed copy of a book where the notes are written provides a personal context for the note that a website, by itself, cannot immediately provide.
As initially installed Pliny supports annotation for web pages, images and PDF
documents. Separate software components within Pliny have been written for each
of these media types, and each of them support, simultaneously, mechanisms to
display the object (web page, image or PDF) and to support annotation of these
objects. However, although the annotation items appear initially with the web or
PDF page or image to which they are attached, they also became also objects that
work in the larger Pliny context as independent objects in their own right.
Thus, in some ways like the printed book, the Pliny screen becomes the nexus
between the
Figures 1 and 2, then, emphasise the
The remaining two areas focus on the role of these annotations in notetaking and interpretation building. In the middle area we see someone using Pliny to discover and record concepts of interest to him/her. Although any real use of Pliny would likely result in many hundreds of concepts being identified and organised there, for the purposes of simplifying this diagram we only show two of them, labelled
It is important to note that the central area in figure 3 represents
Note, as well, that the various objects shown in figure 3 form a web of connections that to some extent tracks the web of connections in the Pliny user's mind as she creates the various objects represented there. Pliny then provides a kind of glue that connects references to documents of various media to the user’s own set of ideas that are also stored as a network.
As is perhaps clear by now, Pliny is not a website but an
Although Pliny is a software application, it is built on top of the Eclipse
framework which provides a conceptual model for application development that is
particularly well suited to the development of collaborating peer related
components such as what is implied in the Borg application
, reusing software
development work from others as a way to efficiently implement aspects of the
software that they need. Like the Borg on
Not all modular software development operates in a way that hides the constituent
modules. The need for different applications to share a workspace so that they
can all interact on their shared data is common in data- and text-mining
toolkits, and the approach used there is often characterised as a kind of
modularity called the data-flow model. One uses the data flow approach by
connecting separate tools together – the data being processing is first passed
into one tool which transforms it in some way and generates output that is
passed (flowed) as input into the second, and so forth. Although data-flow does,
indeed, enable a framework where different pieces of software can co-exist and
remain evident to the user, this paradigm is insufficient for annotation, since
annotations have not so much the need to share data that they
Having drawn our attention to the intimate nature of the interaction between components in Pliny’s annotation framework, we now look at figure 4, which redrafts the ideas in figure 3 into an application-oriented perspective. Here, the different applications (browser, PDF viewer, WordHoard and an application called
The top three applications in figure 4 (shown here in orange and already
incorporated into basic Pliny) simply present PDF and web pages. They are really
media players, but, by being
This is implied in figure 4, where the two Pliny-aware software applications (an
imaginary
Although application-thinking recognises that not all applications that might
support annotation need to be merely presenters of media, digital annotation has
been almost universally thought of as an activity connecting things to parts of
media files. The reason for this orientation, of course, might well be that
thinking about annotation has come from thinking about annotation on paper, and
paper is a kind of media. Furthermore, much of the thinking about annotation has
grown out of the digital library and WWW research community, where the objects
of interest have been almost exclusively media-oriented "documents", rather than
as a more diverse set of digital objects that can actually be represented in
software. Indeed, much of WWW terminology, centered as it is still primarily on
the conception of the web being made up of a large collection of documents,
encourages one to recognise only media-like digital objects as the kind of
objects involved in things like annotation. One sees this assumption everywhere.
Note the definition for annotation, for example, in OntoText’s widely quoted
glossary of definitions of terms related to ontologies as a form of meta-data
attached to a particular section of document content,
where
media
as the things that might be annotated in the
Open Annotations Collaboration’s data model’s
Viewing annotation as an activity that connects material from separate applications rather than media together is a more general one, and a better fit to the fuller potential of digital technology than the more static media perspective. It has the potential of liberating us from confining our thinking to things that are conventionally rendered over the WWW: largely static objects such as textual documents, images, 3D objects and even video and audio, and opens our thinking to deal with annotation in the context of the application-oriented perspective of the WWW that is still emerging. Indeed, this shift in thinking is in line with what is clearly a current trend in the digital humanities: towards thinking of the web as a place where applications (things like, say, tools for text analysis, textual data mining or network analysis) can work on materials rather than merely presenting them. These tools when delivered over the web also do not exhibit a kind of “media orientation”, and assumptions such as those mentioned above about annotation do not serve them well either.
The Mellon MATC prize awarded in 2008 for Pliny allowed the idea of annotation in
the broader application-oriented context I have just described to be explored
within Pliny. Was the integration of a complex application, with Pliny to handle
notetaking within that application, really practical? How did the act of
supporting annotation in the Pliny context affect how the application had to be
written? What, if any, were the technical constraints under which such an
application would have to be written if it was to support personal annotation,
and how onerous was it for developers to meet them? Before we started planning
to try out Pliny integration with a large application we had already explored
the development of small applications that co-operated with Pliny as test cases.
We built a small application, for example, to allow someone to annotate a
GoogleMap, and we did another to work with images from the image archive
provided through the Victoria and Albert’s public API. Both these applications implemented parts of the
Pliny approach to annotation handling, and allowed Google Maps, or collections
of VA materials, to integrate in the
I was aware of Martin Mueller and Northwestern University’s
The Mellon MATC funding has allowed us to explore this approach more substantially by applying the strategy used by Pliny as a real example of substantial integration between two independently developed substantial tools. The questions were:
This list of concerns, and of things learned from them is, of course, of interest to several different communities. In this article I focus on topics related to issues 3 and 4, but the other issues need to be discussed in the forums appropriate to them.
As it turned out, the task of building a complete version of WordHoard that co-existed with Pliny and allowed for the kind of intimacy of interaction implied in this article proved out to be a task that was too large for the funding provided for it. This was in part due to the challenge of getting our excellent Java programmers familiar enough with the Eclipse plugin way of doing things to allow them to be efficient in their development work – and this was compounded by the fact that our original programmer had to leave the project partway through, and as a result we had to change programmer midstream – requiring the training process to be carried out twice.
The initial aim was to, as much as possible, mirror the original WordHoard
interface and integrate into it annotation components from Pliny, and we tried
to do this by leaving the
Two of WordHoard’s displays are visible in the screenshot of our Pliny-compatible interface for WordHoard shown in figure 6. In the lower left corner we can see the WordHoard
Perhaps the most obvious place to start thinking about integration between
WordHoard and Pliny was WordHoard's text display, where the texts within the
WordHoard corpus can be viewed. Indeed, WordHoard itself supported an annotation
component there already. We thought of Pliny's annotation paradigm as one
centered on the provision of a 2-D space were notes can be laid out (there is a
discussion of in what way this is central to the conception of Pliny in
An important part of our task with integrating Pliny into WordHoard centred
around our recognition that a software user might want to annotation anything
the application showed him/her: an idea that we have started to call the
In the interest of software development expediency, we added Pliny annotation to other WordHoard displays by means of a technically simpler approach than what we used in the text display by providing a separate 2D annotation area to the right of the main WordHoard display where notes and reference to other Pliny materials could be put. The degree of integration between the annotations and the display that triggered them in the mind of the user was, then, substantially less than it had been for the text display, but it still at least allowed users to add comments about what they are seeing in the displays whenever they wished. You can see Pliny's annotation area for WordHoard's word information display on the right in figure 7.
We also did some work to render the WordHoard concordance tool with Pliny annotation support.
Figure 8 shows a screenshot of the WordHoard concordance display centred on Shakespeare's
use of the lemma
In this case, perhaps because a KWIC concordance is both highly structured and
can contain many entries, Northwestern's original developers chose to display it
hierarchically. Within this display the user could choose among several
different ways to group and order the KWIC entries, and could use the hierarchy
to selectively open only certain of the categories thus created. In Figure 8,
the user has chosen to group the lemmas by the work in which they appear, and we
can see various Shakespeare plays with the number of occurrences of the word
house
displayed (gray background). Two notes have been added to the display
already, but here we see the display at the moment that the user had chosen to
open two of the work entries (
Between Agnosti and Ferro's formal definition of annotation, and the more recent
and ongoing development of the Open Annotation Collaboration's initiative
we find an emerging understanding of annotation that I call here the
Consider a situation when I am reading, say, Kierkegaard's
Only one who works gets bread.This passage triggers a personal reaction that I want to record. In my particular print edition this happens to be on page 57. So, I circle the part of the text on that page that talks about this and add a note beside it with my reaction.
There is, of course, a
For personal annotations written into a printed book, this distinction does not really
matter very much – page 57 in my copy always has been, and always will be about
this proverb, and the fact is that when I see this annotation any time in the
future I will think about its connection to the proverb rather than to where it
is on the page. However, it is useful to note the incompleteness in the formal
semantics from an outsider's point of view. Someone talking about my note to a
third party is more likely to say that it was linked to the place in the text
where Kierkegaard is writing about this proverb, rather than that John linked
his note to the text 7 centimetres from the top of page 57
. Indeed, she might
well say, in my edition, this passage is on page 63
, making it clear that she
thinks of the link being to the idea represented on page 57 in my copy, rather
than to a spot on the page.
Indeed, in Pliny the method used to attach an annotation to an area in a PDF file works in a way that is very similarly to what happens on the printed page. The anchoring spot is recorded as an area on the printed page rather than linked to the objects the area on the page is showing. Indeed, Pliny is not aware of the link-to-the-idea at all. However, since PDF processors work hard to always place the text on the same place on each electronic page, this works fine. A display of a PDF of
The issue is the same with media that operate in real time such as video or audio. Although we may not think of video or audio as static, they both have a kind of fixeded-ness about them too. Take as an example the period of time from 19 minutes 45 seconds to 20 minutes in Stanley Kubrick’s
This deficit between what is digitally recorded and what is
How could this semantic deficit be reduced, so that this comment about this area
of space as shown from earth could be connected to all of them? An obvious
answer would be to define the target of the comment to something that more
satisfactorily links semantically to this region of space – perhaps the actual
astronomical co-ordinates relative to the Celestial Sphere, for example. By
attaching the annotation to something that connects to the
The approach of locating a segment of a file as the anchor for an annotation works well enough for media-playing applications, even with the semantic deficit it entails. However, not all computer applications are media players. What might happen for them?
One of the potentially important differences is connected to the way that data
that an application works with is represented. Most software developers call the
set of digital objects that represent their program's data its model. Usually
best development practice has the model objects kept separate from the surrogate
objects that display the model’s content on the screen. If one added annotation
to an environment that had a backing data model, what would one formally attach
the annotations to? One would expect annotations to link to objects in the model
rather than the corresponding display surrogates. Since these model/anchor
objects would represent the things the software is actually working with one
might believe that this would end up reducing the
This perspective of connecting annotation to an actual model representation of
the object being discussed in the annotation does not appear to be present in
either Agnosti and Ferro or in the OAC data model. Surprisingly, however, Jane
Hunter touches briefly on it. Even though Hunter’s article
focuses on "document annotation practices" (revealing from the start a strong
document/resource/media orientation), she does note that annotation
could also mean something that is not attached to a document about something,
but to the something itself
when she recognises the meaning of genes or proteins
themselves rather than merely to the pages describing them.
In exactly the way that Hunter makes this distinction, Pliny annotation in
WordHoard comes close to exploring annotation of the thing itself
because
WordHoard exhibits the classic model approach to managing its data, with its
data model representing the words in its text as linguistic objects. In
WordHoard's data model, then, there exists instances of an entity called shamest
in line 322 from Act 5 Scene 1 in
In a practical sense, digital annotation of model objects in a piece of software
can only be done when the digital model object it is being attached to is
accessible to the user – usually though some sort of display that the
application can create. Here, however, we run up against the issue we mentioned
briefly earlier that arises out of one of the basic principles of modern
software applications – the separation of the model
. However, any display of the model
data that WordHoard can generate is built out of display surrogates for the
model objects – graphical elements that can display on the screen and act as
intermediaries between the data itself in the model and the window on the
screen. This recognition of the separation between the model objects and its
representation to the user is widely acknowledged among developers, and is a key
element in the widely used Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm of software
development.
This aspect of contemporary software design is relevant to our discussion here
because it brings to the foreground the idea of “context” for the display of
model data. In fact, displays for any particular piece of the model are
generally created by displaying data from several closely-related pieces of the
model, and thus the display is not exactly the same thing as the entity it is
displaying. Because the display of model data is separate from the model data
itself it is possible to show the same piece of model data in different
displays, and therefore different contexts. Indeed, the three displays we have
seen for WordHoard in the figures above all say something about its word
entities such as shamest
in Act 5 Scene 1 of
shamest.
shamest. Although our current implementation of annotation in WordHoard’s KWIC concordance does not, in fact, allow an annotation to be attached to a particular KWIC instance, this could be added.
In these three cases the WordHoard word is presented in different contexts with,
therefore, different kinds of information pulled from the data model and
provided to the user. For the text display the user sees the word in the
extended context of the text that surrounds it. For the Word Information Panel
s/he sees it with its linguistic information, and with the concordance the word
is displayed in the context of nearby words and other instances of the same
word. Any annotation attached to the particular word such as shamest
is actually
attached to the same semantic object in any of these three display contexts.
However the different context in which the word appears may cause the user to
make quite different notes about it. Does it make sense, then, to say that the
annotations are all attached to this same semantic thing? It wouldn’t appear to
be so since the things an annotator might want to say about a word in the
context of the text in which it appears might well be different from what he or
she would want to say when it appears (as it does in WordHoard’s Word
Information display) with its linguistic and morphological information presented
about it.
Thinking about this a little more, then, the different contexts in which the WordHoard word appears can change the situation sufficiently to begin to affect the meaning of the annotation as well – for annotation purposes the meaningful anchor is not only dependent on the anchor object, but also the context in which it is displayed:
By planning to attach annotations to the WordHoard word itself we thought we had
been reducing the word
as anchor for an annotation only a part of the story. The word's context
in its display is seemingly also a significant element.
This clear distinction between the semantic anchor for an annotation and the
context in which it appears is not explicitly made in the standard annotation
model. Agnosti and Ferro come close when they distinguish between a stream (as
context) and a segment (as anchor) in that stream, but a stream segment is
always a part of only one particular stream which contains it, and is thus
always assumed to appear in the same context. The OAC data model does not
recognise this situation well either, blurring the distinction between the
display in which the annotated object appears and the portion of it to which it
applies, and suggesting using of the W3C's Media Fragment specification
to identify a portion of the
target document where possible and what they call a "constrained target" if not
And there is more to say yet. As it turns out the role of context in annotation
becomes more striking when we consider WordHoard's concordance display (Figure
8) because the visual display (the context for notes) can vary so much within
it. Recall that in figure 8 we see a screenshot of the WordHoard concordance
display centred on Shakespeare's use of the lemma house
, with two KWIC
displays opened by the user, for
housethat Shakespeare has exploiting in the different plays. Note, however that they were probably added when the user had particular KWIC displays open that drew her attention to the different meanings for
housein the different plays. If the KWIC displays for other plays are open instead it may not be so obvious that the two annotations are talking about. Although the notes were clearly created as a result of the user working with the KWIC entries, their appearance here, when KWIC entries for only two of the plays are visible, could seem a little odd, since we can no longer directly see what motivated them.
The problem becomes even more evident if the user changes the ordering option for
this display to group usages of house
in a different way. Figure 9 shows the
beginning of the display now grouped and ordered by date of publication.
Here one can see the frequency of use of the word house
varying substantially
over the years, and indeed, perhaps this observation might be the cause for
another Pliny note to be added to the two that are already there. Note, however,
what has happened to the perceived relevance of the two pre-existing annotations
(about the different meanings for house
) made earlier when the concordance was
ordered by the work. They are less evidently relevant to what WordHoard's
concordance display is showing us when the instances are grouped and ordered by
Publication date. Similarly, any note made about Shakespeare's varying use of
the word house
over time that might arise when the user works with this
concordance order – although relevant when occurrences are displayed in this way
again in the future – will seem out of place if the concordance is displayed
again by Work.
The problem arose, of course, out of our assumption when building Pliny/WordHoard
that the targets for annotation could simply be based on the particular display
the user was looking at, and this error grew out of our experience of supporting
annotation for Pliny’s supported digital media; where this problem did not
exist. There, thinking of an annotation as simply linked to a part of a display
seemed to present no problems because the media files, such as image files, web
pages, PDF documents, that drove the display were relatively static. The
The focus on digital libraries and on the World Wide Web has encouraged a view of digital objects primarily as documents, or perhaps more generally as media objects. Although much work has been done exploring environments for presenting these media objects and exploring various strategies for putting them together into larger objects such as collections, the focus on only media files as digital objects has constrained the thinking about the possible range of interactions and their semantics that a human being might have with them.
Digital annotation, as one of these kinds of interactions, has been thought of by
many solely in this document/media context: primarily as an act carried out on
static digital media formats such as those seen in a PDF or video file. This has
been perhaps understandable, not only because of its origins in the
media-oriented WWW, but also because the non-digital inspiration for digital
annotation has primarily been annotation in printed (and therefore static)
books. The publically available version of Pliny, in its basic distributed form,
supported annotation for media objects, and did not seem to disturb the model of
a
In spite of the strong presence of the WWW and media in our thinking about annotation, digital objects are not always pieces of media, and some of the strategies we have for exploring the potential of digital methods for the humanities do not suit them. Northwestern’s
Perhaps if you are not a digital annotation enthusiast you are wondering why this
issue might apply to you. Why should you care? Perhaps annotation has a place to
play in the broader evangelical nature of the digital humanities – the desire by
many in the DH community to promote the new tools as a new way to do the
humanities. These new tools such as text mining often have appeared to be a hard
sell in the humanities, and proponents of them have often found that
traditionally-oriented researchers seem uninterested. Of course, trying to
squeeze a scholarly interest A
through a tool B
which is manifestly not
related to it provides, by itself, a good reason perhaps why sometimes these new
tools have not penetrated the consciousness of mainstream humanities scholars.
However, one can sometimes find situations where even when a particular new tool
Perhaps annotation helps in this situation, particular when done in the way that
Pliny does it. If these new tools had Pliny annotation incorporated into them,
it would be possible for humanists to use annotation to note things in the
results from these new tools that struck them as interesting and to
Furthermore, this need to integrate new tool results with material from older
scholarly practices does not only affect our more cautious colleagues who may be
uncomfortable with these new research paradigms. Even a researcher who
enthusiastically uses these new tools still needs to take the materials s/he
finds there and to integrate them with references to traditional scholarship in
order to present results to the public. Franco Moretti, for instance, developed
his ideas about distant reading through using tools that treated his materials
of study in highly original ways. However, he chose to present these ideas in
the form of a narrative argument in the traditional way: through a printed book
(e.g.,
In the work reported here
Pliny’s working environment provides a powerful model for integration of not just media-presenting tools such as its (already existing) image and PDF annotation tools and potentially other media such as 3D, video or audio objects, but also as an environment which encourages newer, much more broadly conceived, applications to co-exist and even potentially interoperate in complex ways. Our work with the integration of
The work reported on here came from research that was funded in large part by The Mellon Foundation through their MATC award program. The author is particularly grateful to the Foundation for the recognition that made this work possible. I am also grateful to Prof. Martin Mueller and the team who developed WordHoard at Northwestern University for their interest and support for this experiment. Finally, I am very grateful for the work contributed by my two DDH colleagues who did a significant amount of the development work for the WordHoard/Pliny software, and in spite of the technical challenges it represented worked at it very professionally and with good insights and good spirit: Payman Labbaff first, and subsequently Timothy Hill.
I am also grateful to DHQ's anonymous reviewers who encouraged me to somewhat recast this paper's original presentation to hopefully make the relevance of the work it describes evident to a larger readership.