OK, I am shamelessly borrowing an idea from Kate George (whose excellent blog is here). My thesis project involves annotating (writing explanatory notes for) an online version of James Joyce's Ulysses. So when you're reading along and you come to a character name or an allusion to a work of
literature, etc, you can click on it and a window pops up with an
explanation. We have the text of the book up on a website, and my thesis advisor has already written notes for the first two chapters. I'm supposed to write a few more, plus create a "cast of characters" page to help the reader keep track of all the dozens of characters.
Here is where I need some input. Ulysses is an enormously complex book, and most readers need some help with understanding it. But on the other hand, annotations can be intrusive and irritating when you're trying to read. At the moment, we have it set up so that text with an annotation is a different color font, so you know you can click on it to see a note. You can turn the annotations on or off. Having them off is great for readers who want to just go without being distracted by different colors of text, but on the other hand, then you don't know what's annotated and what's not.
So first of all, feel free to comment in general on the idea of reading a book online. More specifically, if you were reading a complicated e-book with lots of historical allusions and a large cast of characters, how would you want the annotations to be presented? pop-up window? link to a separate page that opens in a new tab? something that shows up (like a tool-tip) when you hover over a word or name? Also, more generally: what kinds of help would you want? what would you not want?
You can comment anonymously, so even if you usually just lurk I'd love to hear what you think.
I like the idea of a pop up box. It annoys me to click on a link and get pulled out of my reading onto a separate page. The idea that you could hover over a word and a pop up box would appear appeals to me.
ReplyDeleteI also think a different color text on the word or idea is nice - without an underline. But I wouldn't make the color too bright. That would be obnoxious. So there you go, I have no problem voicing my opinion!
Oh, and being able to turn the annotations off is a great idea too.
ReplyDeletethanks, Kate! I appreciate the input!
DeleteI've been reading (yay, required reading) here: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Literature/Literature-idx?type=HTML&rgn=div1&byte=57100361&pview=hide
ReplyDeleteand I like the way the annotation is marked with a slight colour change, but I don't like it opening a new page and then having to point and click to navigate away again.
The idea of being able to hover over text to see the annotation appeals most to me. Being able to switch it off would also be good, as would be a central spot where you could look through the annotations, maybe?
Eva!!! Hi! OK, I will check out that link and see how they do it. We've been looking for some examples of other sites that are doing it well. Thanks for the input. Part of our problem is our limited programming skills-- I can think of lots of things that would be great to do if only we knew how to do them. ha.
DeleteCheery-o sent this one via e-mail, since blogger wasn't letting her comment. (thanks, Cheery-o!)
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of a pop-up window indicated by a different color ink or different font. Our eyes are so smart, they learn really quickly. It would be nice if the pop-up was smart and would let you move it around on the screen and resize it and so on, so you could read the notes and go back to the text and so on.
Pop up for sure. I would also just like the annotations to be short, so I'm not pulled out of the reading too long. But it could contain a link to a wiki entry so that if I wanted to read more, I could click on that and go elsewhere (well on a tablet, maybe not a kindle type thingy.)
ReplyDelete