Four from the iSchool to speak at Balisage conference

Doctoral student Jacob Jett, faculty affiliate Timothy W. Cole, Research Associate Professor David Dubin, and Professor and Dean Allen H. Renear will present, “Discerning the intellectual focus of annotations,” at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2016.

Abstract: Much attention has been given to strategies for anchoring annotations in digital documents, but very little to identifying what the annotation is actually about. We may think of annotations as being about their anchors, but that is not typically the case. Two annotations may have the same anchor, such as a string of characters, but one annotation is about the sentence represented by that string and the other about the claim being made by that sentence. Identifying targets and making this information available for computational processing would provide improved support for a variety of information management tasks. We discuss this problem and explore a possible extension to the W3C Web Annotation Data Model that would help with annotation target identification.          

Balisage will be held on August 2-5 in North Bethesda, Maryland. In addition to presenting at the conference, Renear is a member of the conference advisory board.

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