The general situation regarding annotation, and some questions about the activity (such as how much information to include and how to order the information), remain relatively constant no matter what the medium. They are equally relevant and problematical for print annotations and for digital ones. But, for several reasons, digital presentation opens up new possibilities and therefore new angles to the questions.
For one thing, there is much less restriction regarding the space that annotations can take up in digital presentations. Print annotations typically need to be kept short, or to take up less space than the primary text, or to fill up fewer than, say, 500 pages, but these kinds of limitations disappear in digital presentations. Also, there is no need to posit only one kind of audience, whether first-time readers, or students plus some more experienced readers, or scholars. Because information can be doled out as users request it, a digital presentation can plan for several different levels of readers. In the Throwaway example, it is possible to posit a readership that includes both people who should not be told anything about Bloom's throwaway phrase, "I was just going to throw it away," and also people who won't be bothered or compromised by being told everything that can be said about the phrase.
For digital presentation, the question then becomes how to present the information, how to be tactful. I helped run and participated in a month-long discussion regarding annotation on the University of Utah's J-Joyce email discussion list in November and December 1998, and we considered questions like this. (I posted a condensed version of the messages on my Web site.) One possibility is to construct the information in layers, so that a series of screens starts with basic factual and identifying information and then expands into more elaborate information and ultimately into various interpretations. Beginning readers can start with the basic information and, only if they want it, move on to more elaborate information. More advanced readers can choose to start with the more advanced information and skip the basic identifications that they probably already know.
A related question involves how much information beginners should be told.
It is counterproductive (and one of the reasons that students often don't read
printed annotations) to give beginners more information than they want. If they
are looking for a simple definition of a word or identification of a detail,
a long paragraph full of scholarly information is overkill - it might turn them
off the annotations, and maybe even off the book itself. It seems most useful
to make the first-level annotation as simple and short as is realistically possible
(5 words? 10? 25? whatever will suffice in each case) and then give readers
easy access to more information. If a reader wants only a quick fix on a word
or phrase in order to keep reading, the least intrusive annotation is probably
the most successful one.
It is possible, I think, to summarize the issues involved in thinking about annotation in digital presentation by formulating a few questions.
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Annotation in Print and On a Screen
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