A Collaborative Annotation Environment for Google Books

Project Team: Vivian Choy, Jacque Giebel, Jun Pan, Derek Christian Quezada

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Abstract:

Google is a company that has excelled in providing online information services to an ever-growing global population. One prominent service, which has gained popularity by providing access to an accumulation of digitized texts, is Google Books. The scanning of over 12 million literary works, some of which contain out-of-print publications, has provided a new means of boosting information literacy. By researching the practices of digital humanities scholars, it has become apparent that Google Books does not currently meet the needs of this academic discipline. Interviews with various scholars in the field have revealed the demand for a digital, collaborative environment. Vital attributes include intuitiveness, ease of navigation, the ability to insert links accompanied by notes, and to take into consideration the life cycle of the annotations. The foundation of this project was built upon initial experiences with Zotero (an online bibliographical management tool), the Mark Twain Project (an ambitious collaborative venture to annotate all his works), and the Ivanhoe Project (a dynamic role-playing environment for literary collaboration). These collaborative environments have initialized an interest in designing an interface within Google Books that scholars would use. By taking into account their needs, we have proposed an interface featuring the ability for collaborative annotation. This would be achieved through utilizing already existing Google services, color-coding individual users within a group, providing a variety of annotation types and tools, display filters, the ability to tag displayed comments, and the exportation of annotations in certain formats.