Annotation Studio is a web based application designed to engage its users with a hands-on digital approach to analyzing texts. Users have the ability to practice and develop skills that pertain to a humanities standpoint by annotating readings and primary sources while also sharpening their proficiency of online web use. With an indefinitely growing digital library in today’s world coupled by the decline of hard texts, it wouldn’t be completely impractical to assume the practice of annotating paper copies to go gradually obsolete. Especially confronted by continual environmental issues, the strive for a “green world” may even warrant changes that will reform the very fundamentals of our learning core. Preparing for that end, HyperStudio has launched this application, which demonstrates the capability that digital techniques can offer under a humanities discipline. Its keystone ability to add multimedia annotations to an area of the text is just the beginning relative to the features projected to be implemented.
First, quickly register for the site and log in. This process is straightforward and self-explanatory. Next, create a new document.
Next you should copy and paste the text you want to annotate. Therefore, ideally, the text you want to annotate should have open source online. This is a pretty substantial downfall; beforehand, Annotation Studio had the ability to upload documents as well, which would go well with textual documents in which highlighting functions were disrupted, disabling users from directly copying and pasting text.
Next, shown above is a feature to link off the main text into different segments, effectively outlining big chunks of text into different chapters, reminiscent of writing a book but online. It is important to put the following html code in the first box:
<a name=”2HCH0001″ id=”2HCH0001″></a>
and the second html code in the box underneath followed by the text in that chapter/segment.
<li><a href=”#2HCH0001″>1. Loomings.</a></li>
Embedding this html code into this blog post, it looks like this:
Next, is the metadata, which is self-explanatory as well since we’ve all had our fair share of tedious copy pasting with our DublinCore and Omeka exhibits. Aside from that portion, if we take a look under the Status area, the Draft option means that the user may edit/write/type, adding to the text of document once it has been created, while the Published option disables the user’s ability to edit the text of the document and only allows for annotations. Finally, create document.
To annotate a portion of the text, open up the document and drag and highlight the segment of words you want to annotate. The application will prompt you with an image caption with a notepad and pencil, then this block will show up. In this block, after you write your annotation, you can choose to either allow groups to view this annotation or not. If you had previously added classes/groups in the option to share your document when creating it, your annotation will also be visible to those groups. The finished annotation should look like this:
Next, to embed a video, drag and highlight a portion of the text and click the icon above the text annotation area to open up the menu below. The video needs to be open source online, which just means accessible through the online web. Weirdly enough, you cannot press Ok. Instead press cancel and after press save.
The finished embed should look like this:
That’s it folks. For further documentation, go visit Annotation Studio to learn more about future implementations for features and such. For further information on how to use the web app, this page compiles a playlist of different tutorial videos on Annotation Studio. Annotation Studio is also an open source based software; here is a link to the repository showcasing the different components of the web app.
