On Public and Private Annotations

This topic is HilaryHolz's attempt to see if she can get MutualDiscovery students more comfortable starting out keeping their notes online...

Some background

1. "Preliminary results obtained by comparing personal annotations on paper with shared annotations made on-line show that only a small fraction of personal annotations are used in initiating and responding to related on-line discussions. The personal annotations that are shared tended to correspond to explicit marginalia; much effort is still put into rendering both the content and anchors of thse annotations intelligible to others." from From Personal to Shared Annotations what she is saying is that they could trace the shared annotations back to specific 'scribblings' and notations in the margins. there is often a graphical component to marginalia. one of the limitations of online annotation systems is often the restricted drawing ability.
2. "By analyzing over 1,700 annotations, we confirmed three hypotheses: (1) only a small fraction of annotations made while reading are directly related to those shared in discussion; (2) some types of annotations – those that consist of anchors in the text coupled with margin notes – are more apt to be the basis of public commentary than other types of annotations; and (3) personal annotations undergo dramatic changes when they are shared in discussion, both in content and in how they are anchored to the source document." from Exploring the Relationship between Personal and Public Annotations so the vast majority of personal annotations are lost if written on paper
3. "Specifically, this paper reports on: (1) how sharing encountered items fits into the broader spectrum of clipping practices; (2) the function and value of the shared information; and (3) the social role of sharing the encountered information. We conclude that from a technological standpoint, we should think beyond an email model for sharing encountered information and, from a social perspective, we should attend to how sharing this sort of material contributes to the strength of social ties outside of a traditional information needs framework." from Sharing encountered information: digital libraries get a social life

Hilary's comments

We've come up with multiple answers to these conundrums over time:

• a wider set of agile artifacts to directly mediate the process - keep physical notes, but also keep online notes in the wiki.
• don't worry about whether someone can make sense of your notes, their your notes.

People

• Cathy Marshall is a wonderful industrial researcher at Microsoft. She works on devices, is very interested in tablet PCs, and published a lot on public vs. personal annotations.

References

-- HilaryHolz - 14 Apr 2009