Annotation Web Standards Research Overview

This research project combines some on-going work with the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) and my own research interests on web annotations.

The goals of this summer position are threefold:

1. Produce a review article for JASIST that describes the evolution of web annotations, and reviews existing empirical research. The goal of this should be to both synthesize the previous studies of annotations (across a variety of domains) and chart out a research agenda for web annotations.

• There is one previous ARIST chapter on annotations and tagging. Our review article would update this previous chapter by reviewing technical advances, and more thoroughly describing empirical results of annotation related studies since 2009 (minus the tagging component).
• • Hunter, J. (2009). Collaborative semantic tagging and annotation systems. Annual review of information science and technology, 43(1), 1-84.

2. At QDR we have data from a set of workshops where we convened scholars to annotate research publications. Emerging from this work is a need to create a typology of author generated annotations (the motivations for applying an annotation). This typology should compliment and extend existing work of W3C Web Annotation Data model (see section 3.3.5 "Motivation and Purpose" here.

I have done a little writing about this (now a few years old), but we can work from this draft to develop a study design, execute the study, and publish the results. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rgf8onHgQpcjUJ-1bOFGhRq8KX82qQIPR-Vt6jqcJkM/edit?usp=sharing

3. More broadly, I am interested in the W3C as a sociotechnical space for web standard development. I think there are interesting and fruitful organizational, insitutitonal, and information science questions to ask of W3C. What excites me is that there is so much historical data available (email lists, draft documents, etc). There is also an opportunity to compare the semantic web standards developed by an open organization like W3C to something like schema.org which is more industry focused.