Applications of collaborative annotation system in digital curation, crowdsourcing, and digital humanities
| Pages | 1122-1140 |
| Date | 06 November 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-08-2016-0172 |
| Published date | 06 November 2017 |
| Author | Chih-Ming Chen,Ming-Yueh Tsay |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Applications of collaborative
annotation system in digital
curation, crowdsourcing, and
digital humanities
Chih-Ming Chen and Ming-Yueh Tsay
Graduate Institute of Library, Information and Archival Studies,
National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan
Abstract
Purpose –Collaboratively annotating digital texts allow users to add valued information, share ideas and
create knowledge. Most importantly, annotated content can help users obtain a deeper and broader
understanding of a text compared to digital content without annotations. This work proposes a novel
collaborative annotation system (CAS) with four types of multimedia annotations including text annotation,
picture annotation, voice annotation and video annotation which can embedded into any HTML Web pages
to enable users to collaboratively add and manage annotations on these pages and provide a shared
mechanism for discussing shared annotations among multiple users. By applying the CAS in a mashup on
static HTML Web pages, this study aims to discuss the applications of CAS in digital curation,
crowdsourcing and digital humanities to encourage existing strong relations among them.
Design/methodology/approach –This work adopted asynchronous JavaScript (Ajax) and a model-view-
controller framework to implement a CAS with reading annotation tools for knowledge creating, archiving and
sharing services, as well as applying the implemented CAS to support digital curation, crowdsourcing and digital
humanities. A questionnaire survey method was used to investigate the ideas and satisfaction of visitors who
attended a digital curation with CAS support in the item dimensions of the interactivity withdisplayed products,
the attraction and the content absorption effect. Also, to collect qualitative data that may not be revealed by the
questionnaire survey, semi-structured interviews were performed at the end of the digital curation exhibition
activity. Additionally, the effects of the crowdsourcing and digital humanities with CAS support on collecting and
organizing ideas and opinions for historical events and promoting humanity research outcomes were considered as
future works because they all need to take a long time to investigate.
Findings –Based on the questionnaire survey, this work found that the digital curation with CAS
support revealed the highest rating score in terms of the item dimension of attraction effect. The result
shows applying CAS to support digital curation is practicable, novel and interesting to visitors.
Additionally, this work also successfully applied the developed CAS to crowdsourcing and digital
humanities so that the two research fields may be brought into a new ground.
Originality/value –Based on the CAS,this work developed a novel digitalcuration approach which hasa
high degreeof satisfaction on attractioneffect to visitors, an innovativecrowdsourcing platformthat combined
with a digital archive system to efficiently gather collective intelligence to solve the difficult problems of
identifying digital archive contents and a high potential digital humanity research mode that can assist
humanities scholarsto annotate the texts with distinct interpretation and viewpoints on an ancient map, as
well as discusswith other humanities scholarsto stimulate discussionon more issues.
Keywords Digital humanities, Crowdsourcing, Digital curation, Collaborative annotation systems
Paper type Technical paper
1. Introduction
In 2012, the Association of College and Research Libraries in the USA presented the
development trend in academic libraries. As mentioned under the point “data
EL
35,6
1122
Received25 August 2016
Revised5 February 2017
Accepted25 March 2017
TheElectronic Library
Vol.35 No. 6, 2017
pp. 1122-1140
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/EL-08-2016-0172
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-0473.htm
curation”, standards for all types of data continue to evolve so that the data curation
challenges are increasing. This leads to librarians and other information workers
collaborating intimately with their research communities to facilitate the
development of data curation. It is also mentioned that information technology
continues to drive much of the futuristic thinking within academic libraries (ACRL,
2015). The issues mentioned above include the reflection on the challenge of a
library’s role, which becomes more complicated and the further evolvement with
users under the digitalization trend. With the prosperous development of new
technology, academic libraries must provide flexible, nimble and responsive services
for users, create a more efficient and convenient access to resources and information
and establish a new connection with academic resources. Consequently, academic
libraries should provide more innovative academic resource services and integrate
special collection materials, research resources and digital information system with
advanced technology.
Due to the influence of information digitalization and internet technology, the library
curation techniques have gradually expanded from traditional curation of physical objects
and collections into digital curation or the integration of substantial and digital curation.
British Digital CurationCentre proposed to deliberately take required resourcesinto account
before the display and suggested that “digital curation lifecycle”had to present definite
work objectives at various stages, allow data being maintained, managed and added value
in the lifecycle and presentlong-term preservation and accessibility (DigitalCuration Centre,
2016). In recent years, Social Sciences Information Center (SSIC) of National Chengchi
University (NCCU) Libraries in Taiwan, which is a modern research library, has already
had great experiences and achieved remarkable success in digital curation. With the
combination of information visualization techniques and the experiences in supporting
the interaction with large display installations in several digital curations, SSIC
presented the originally planar and static historical materials in a digital way. A prior
study (Chen et al., 2012) has successfully developed a reading annotation and knowledge
sharing tool, which can annotate a Web page with HTML format archived by the Taiwan
libraries’history digital library based on Web 2.0 technologies, to collect user-generated
contents so that the digital library’s contents grow dynamically as readers contribute
knowledge. In recent years, the developed reading annotation and knowledge sharing
tool was further developed and enhanced as a collaborative annotation system (CAS)
with more powerful annotating functions. In 2015, the CAS was applied to the digital
curation in the Annual Forum of NCCU Digital Archives and Research 2015 for the first
time to encourage visitors to become actively involved in the interaction with the display.
It enabled the visitors to supplement the content or express their thoughts so that the
interaction between visitors and products could be enhanced, thus promoting an efficient
knowledge transfer beyond the one-way information flow.
Furthermore, crowdsourcing is an emerging model for task dividing, problem
solving and then goal achieving via the Internet (Brabham, 2008). It is also defined as
the process of organizing by soliciting contributions from an undefined public, the
organization or the company outsourcing the tasks to contributors from different
backgrounds, acting on their own initiative (Whitla, 2009). In the fields of libraries,
museums and digital humanities, this kind of model also takes place to collect and
organize ideas and opinions for historical events and social issues. To gather
collective intelligence, SSIC also develops a crowdsourcing platform based on the
CAS. Through the integration of the CAS with digital archives platform with digital
resources, users can annotate and discuss the words and pictures in historical digital
Collaborative
annotation
system
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