[damien-boveModerator]

@Rainer

Will Recogito v2 have a place where annotators can leave notes or messages? I’m thinking of something like the wikipedia ‘talk’ page (though probably less formal and less argumentative. Because v2 will allow multiple interpretations, there shouldn’t be the sort of ‘editing wars’ you see in wikipedia). Anyway, I feel it would be helpful if we had somewhere to leave a memo, explain our reasoning, air our doubts*, or ask for advice.

While this Recogito Users forum might be a good place to discuss general matters, it doesn’t seem like the place to enter into discussions about particular documents. Am I wrong?

[* @etebarker has described the annotation is an ‘assertion’. That is, we shouldn’t worry too much if it’s wrong, as someone can always change it later.  Nevertheless, sometimes I feel my annotations are more proposals than they are assertions, and I’d like them to be read as such.]

 

• This topic was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by  damien-bove.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by  damien-bove.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by  damien-bove.

[c-palladinoParticipant]

I would very much like to see this. I entirely see the point of annotation as a scholarly statement, but I experienced several cases where explaining the reason of a correction or discussing it would have been necessary.

Yes, there are comments. But maybe we need to establish what we want to use comments for. Otherwise they are very likely to become a sort of deposit for any sort of thing – and nobody will ever bother about reading them.

Does this make sense?

[Rainer SimonKeymaster]

There’s probably two cases to distinguish: discussions about a particular annotation (e.g. a specific mapping of a toponym to a particular gazetteer ID) vs. discussions about the document as a whole. I think @damien-bove, you’re specifically refering to the latter? That’s not on the list as a feature right now, but I could add that (which doesn’t mean it will get implemented right away – but it will be formally on my list).

In terms of layout/information architecture, Recogito has different “areas” on the document level (accessible through an icon bar that remains visible in all areas – see below). I could see this fit in very well as one of them.

I always thought the “sharing & collaboration settings” (indicated by the ‘Users’ icon, 2nd from right) should be rolled into the general document settings area (last icon) anyway, so the Users icon could make way for a “talk” icon, which would lead to a commenting section.

@c-palladino: I agree. But when it comes to discussing a specific annotation, whether the comments are read or not is perhaps (at least to some degree) also a matter of how prominent they are made in the UI. In the new UI, they will IMO be quite a bit more visible (see below); and (unlike in Recogito 1) they will come with proper indication of who made the comment (and when). But I agree we should start defining (or collecting) practices on what we want to use comments for.

 

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by  Rainer Simon.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by  Rainer Simon.

[Rainer SimonKeymaster]

Another issue that comes to mind: @damien-bove, your brought up the need for commenting on a specific part of an annotation. (I.e. if you attach multiple transcriptions, then you’d add a note saying something about the source of that particular transcription.) I still don’t have a clear view about how to best go about that… But I’ll definitely revisit this once I get to the image annotations. In the mean time: any thoughts appreciated!

[damien-boveModerator]

Sorry! I didn’t make that clear. I was, in this case, asking about a message board for the document as a whole.

I had been thinking about it the other day with regard to transcriptions of contractions. It occurred to me that while a Recogito-wide policy on contractions might not work, it would be good at least to be consistent across a document. With perhaps half a dozen people working on the same document, that requires some communication.

It might be used for identifying sources (something that could be done for each annotation, but might be better done at the outset, for the whole document).

I’m sure there are plenty of similar examples.

As for comments on particular parts of an annotation – I don’t have a clear idea myself. Perhaps we should send you the most challenging examples as they arise.

 

[c-palladinoParticipant]

I think that comments are preferable for the annotation on specific parts of a document (if I understand correctly what we mean by “parts”…). And the new interface may well serve the purpose, it looks fantastic @rainer!

I was specifically thinking of instances where I found wrong annotations of continents in documents that I know too well make reference to “Asia”, for example, as a conceptual entity and not as a region. I would have liked to motivate that correction with references and arguments, that were properly displayed in the comment section. Generally I see that people use comments as very short reports, and with not much consistency. So perhaps looking at the new phase of Recogito it’s time to set up a new series of Guidelines about correct usage of such features

 

[Elton BarkerKeymaster]

As usual, Chiara, you’ve raised some really interesting and important points. Briefly (I mean it this time!):

1. Comments. You’re absolutely right that comments can be somewhat ad hoc (at least mine are). I was aware of this at the time when I was making them myself; nevertheless, I thought it important to record “some issues” while I was in the process of working on/through them. I also noticed that my comments would change form or nature depending on my previous experience and what I thought might be helpful for someone else reading my record. Therefore, I for one would welcome some consistency brought to them and the idea of establishing some “guidelines” sounds great to me. Perhaps we could even have a dropdown menu of options or something like that? (The same goes for tags too: it would be useful to see what tags have been used before, especially if we think that tags are going to be a useful means of searching through the Pelagios network at some point.)

2. Corrections. Your specific example of Asia got me thinking, since I’ve also noticed that in my own work (Asia as a counterpoint to Europe, for e.g., *not* a discrete geographical region and certainly not a Roman province; cf. Libya or Aethiopia or even Iberia). But I don’t think it’s enough for us to “comment” on this; I think it would be important for the user to feed back to the appropriate gazetteer the information (since if a user is marking “Asia” as a region, that’s probably because there’s no adequate appropriate gazetteer record). Would there be an aggregated way of feeding back these corrections/suggestions for the appropriate gazetteer to harvest?

[c-palladinoParticipant]

I completely agree on both your points Elton…and I was forgetting one very important thing – tags! We should definitely make a good use of them, they could be so powerful in more refined research frameworks and we always tend to neglect them

Precisely, complex instances deserve discussion, maybe also the possibility of collecting several references together. And that’s where @damien-bove‘s remark comes very useful I think.

[Elton BarkerKeymaster]

There should be a “like” function on this forum. In other words, yes, absolutely!

[Rainer SimonKeymaster]

@damien-bove: I think a document-level message board makes a lot of sense, so I created an official issue for this in the Recogito2 work plan.

As for comments on particular parts of an annotation – I don’t have a clear idea myself. Perhaps we should send you the most challenging examples as they arise.

Yes, please do so!

@c-palladino: thanks And, like @etebarker, +1 on starting to develop a new set of guidelines! One thing perhaps worth mentioning is that in Recogito 2, it will be possible to associate multiple gazetteer IDs with one annotation. Originally, that was motivated by the use case of one piece of text actually refering to multiple places (“the town and the river named…”, “The four Gallias”, etc.). But I think it’s equally valuable to suggest alternatives (and documenting them with an accompanying comment), without brutally removing the previous annotator’s mapping. Not quite sure about the dropdown though, @etebarker? For the tags: these are planned to be “pickable” from previous uses.

As far as feeding back to gazetteers is concerned: I’m linking to another topic that @damien-bove started earlier (but which is yet to be discussed 😉 ) Frankly, I think this is a tricky one, primarily because it requires active participation from (all?) our gazetteer partners. In terms of infrastructure, the simplest thing – harvesting data e.g. marked with a specific tag – would already be possible. Bigger investments in terms of effort (e.g. actual gazetteer building) will very likely beyond what we can achieve in the current plan.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by  Rainer Simon.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by  Rainer Simon.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by  Rainer Simon.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by  Rainer Simon.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by  Rainer Simon.

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