Abstract

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.