Teaching development grants final and financial report: Open annotation and humanities education

Social annotation takes something that academics do habitually-annotating books and papers, often by writing in their margins-and makes it a collaborative, open-source project. Applications of social annotation are being actively explored in various fields (like computer programming) and in various contexts (like peer review). This project proposes that the social annotation tools now becoming available have a special relevance to humanities education. Despite the field's diversity, humanistic disciplines are fundamentally centered on examining the structures and details of complex texts like novels, histories, philosophies, and archives. While annotation has long been something that readers do alone, this project will show the powerful impact on learning that can be produced when students and instructors annotate together, reimagining the margins of texts as spaces of collaborative, engaging learning and teaching. It will explore how instructors can annotate digital texts in ways that are visible to students, and how students can respond to their instructors and to one another if everybody is looking together at the same digital documents.