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Last Spring’s students successfully annotated the first 30 chapters of Sense and Sensibility. We found better ways to work the Creative Reading annotations into the fabric of classroom discussion, though this remains an area to continue experimenting with. We also substituted peer-to-peer commenting on the Cultural/Historical annotations with “curator” comments sent by email from me to individual students. This proved to be rather labor intensive for said curator, and while student commentary was generally positive about adding this step, some articulated a desire to maintain the peer-to-peer experience as well. We’ll try to find the time in the process to do both this semester. I’ve therefore added an extra “Annotate-a-thon” day into the course schedule for Spring 2018.

Perhaps the highlight of our collective experience last go round was presenting the Annotating Austen project at the first annual SFSU Undergraduate Research Symposium (and competition) in May. Students worked very hard to prepare for this event. We spent a good deal of time figuring out just how we would collectively present an ongoing digital resource such as this. In the end, we decided to maintain a booth for the afternoon instead of giving a formal presentation. We asked for two large monitors and students connected their laptops to these which allowed for attendees to check out the website themselves, and made it possible for students to give mini-demonstrations when called upon. The six student groups all took a turn at the booth, and, truth be told, I didn’t even need to be there. It was, from my perspective, quite wonderful to watch and hear the students explain their work and answer questions about the project. They even handled an anti-Austen judge with more earnestness and grace than he deserved. We didn’t win anything but, hey, it was fun and the food was free.

What follows are some memorable comments culled from 2017 students’ reflective essays (with some editorial response here and there) that might be of interest as we embark on the next iteration of the project:

1. Creative Reading Annotations

• “I had the most fun with the Creative Reading annotations. Writing them inspired me to look for significance between the lines, or through what was not being said explicitly. Writing them also made me think more critically about the action of the novel, and not just accept the story before me. Most importantly, this kind of annotation required me to read the text very closely, something I’ve always struggled to do because I’m eager to keep reading.”
• “Compared to annotating alone and writing one’s own thoughts on a page, demonstrating my views on the website made it feel like I was in a virtual book club.”
• “Being one of the students who doesn’t speak up in class much, the Creative Reading annotations were really enjoyable to me. I was able to comment on other people’s annotations and got to see my other classmates’ reactions to the novel that weren’t mentioned in class.”
• “A better way to incorporate [Creative Reading annotations] into the classroom discussion of the novel could be asking people to share their annotations, or bringing them up on the screen to look at in class.”

2. Cultural/Historical Annotations

• “We published a lot of visuals for readers to have a better understanding as to how the furniture, clothing, and other [material items] looked during the Regency era.”
• “Many terms I found in the novel had a different meaning in Austen’s period than how we define them now in today’s language.” [The Oxford English Dictionary is the essential resource for sorting these historical differences in meaning and usage out; you will all no doubt have occasion to use it.]
• “I definitely learned more about the Regency period by doing research for my annotations and from reading my peers’ annotations.”
• “This part of the assignment improved my research skills and taught me how to use online library resources more effectively.”

3. Advice

• “I think it would be something really important to emphasize to future classes that the [Cultural/Historical] annotations are meant to be helpful notes left behind for future readers, not just a class assignment where you have to do your quota so you can move on to the next assignment.” [Indeed, it’s good to remember that this part of our work exists in the public sphere.]
• “Proofread, proofread, and proofread again.” [Words to live by!!!]

The first semester’s work on our Annotating Austen project is in the books, so to speak, and the next group is about to begin their work. What follows is a composite summary of the reflective essays the Spring 2016 students wrote with their Spring 2017 successors in mind (the prompts for this “Reflective Essay Assignment” can be found under the menu banner “Annotation Assignments” on the website). Overall, I have to say the Spring 2016 students were an enthusiastic bunch that, despite various logistical issues and other hiccups along the way, managed to produce high quality work on Northanger Abbey. In practice, they proved the basic premise of this project: that undergraduate students can participate in—and contribute to—the Jane Austen scholarly community. I’ve organized summaries of their collective comments around the three main categories of annotation that we hope to provide.

1. Creative Reading Annotations

This level of annotation was universally popular. Many students discussed how much they enjoyed and profited from reading and commenting on other students’ “interpretive” or “opinionated” annotations. In effect, these annotations allow students to add more interpretive detail to the annotation system they (hopefully) already employ when reading a printed text: underlining passages, starring text, adding brief marginalia. One student noted that having to expand her short marginal comments using the hypothes.is tool required her “to think even further” about why she found a specific passage particularly interesting or important. Variations of the following student comment showed up often in the essays: “Looking over the creative reading annotations from others in the class helped me pay attention to certain details I had overlooked or not paid much attention to. They definitely opened my eyes to see new perspectives, correlations, and ideas I had not previously thought of, helping me to better understand parts of the novel.”

I also asked students for suggestions regarding how can we better incorporate these “Creative Reading” annotations into classroom discussion. We only managed to reference or summarize a few, which seemed inadequate given the amount of work put into them. Several students suggested in-class strategies for allowing their creative reading annotations to “come alive in conversation.” These include having small groups share and discuss their annotations; have students pair up and read each other’s annotations and discuss; or have me choose several strong annotations, project them on the screen, and discuss as a class. We’ll attempt to implement some version of one of these strategies this semester.

2. Cultural/Historical Annotations

Many students commented on both the value of doing the research for these annotations and the value that they potentially represent to a user of the website. These are the annotations users of the website will see because they show up in the “Public” domain of the hypothes.is tool. The ability to supplement text with visual media—pictures and video clips—makes our online editions of Austen’s novels unique, and students embraced this “functionality” with gusto. Even simple definitions, as for a reference to “a muff,” could be easily augmented with a period image illustrating the thing itself in use. In addition, references to Regency-era dances could be linked to short video clips on YouTube. As one student succinctly said, “When a character is talking about a tear in her ‘mechlin,’ having a visual really does help.”

I gave over two class periods during the semester for “Annotate-a-thons.” The first was devoted to composing and posting annotations, the second to group editing and revising as needed. Some students suggested it would be better to have everyone compose and post their annotations as homework, and then devote all the in-class time to revising, editing, and proofing. There is a valid argument for this, especially since this is the pubic face of the project, and strong, accurate, and well-written annotations in this category are essential. We do need to spend more time editing and refining these.

While many felt the class as a whole had done a fairly thorough job annotating Northanger Abbey in this context, some students articulated the value of having subsequent groups both add to and edit their work. Currently, annotations produced by one student cannot be edited or revised by anyone else (not even me as “curator”) although I think the hypothes.is development team is working on making this possible in future. It would certainly be awkward for the end user of the site to have annotations building on, or superceding, previous annotations for a particular reference in the novel. The ability to revise or edit a single annotation would be most desirable.

The consensus among Spring 2016 participants was that we should move on to the next novel, Sense and Sensibility, and try to get as far as we can with cultural/historical context annotations for this novel in Spring 2017.

3. Criticism Annotations

Truth be told, we ran out of time in Spring 2016 to do anything with this idea. Students agreed that it would be interesting and useful to provide a layer of annotation that linked specific passages in Austen’s novels to published work by professional critics. This could be as simple as highlighting the Austen passage quoted by the critic, and providing an annotation that summarizes how the critic interprets the passage in the service of his/her overall argument. Each annotation would also include a short bibliographic citation, or possibly a link, to the essay or book in question. One student argued that, as a first time reader of an Austen novel, she would not want to see such criticism annotations for fear of overly influencing her own perspective on the text. Fair point. More thought is needed as to where this layer of annotation might live, and how a user might be able to choose to see it or not. This will likely be something we come back to once those logistical issues are solved, and perhaps even after we’ve provided cultural/historical annotations for all six of Austen’s published novels.

A little over a year ago, as I was planning the syllabus for my Jane Austen course for the Spring 2015 semester, I got stuck.  I wanted to bring students an idea for an ongoing digital humanities project centered on Austen’s novels so we could start working on it.  The previous semester that model worked out pretty well for my graduate seminar on eighteenth-century poetry as my vision to create a digital miscellany of “interesting” eighteenth-century poems actually became a thing–Poetical Scavenger–by the end of the semester.  But that “we-gotta-do-this” idea just wasn’t happening this go round.

Part of the problem was Austen, or rather what Austen and her novels have become in both academic and popular culture in the twenty-first century.  In addition to the movies, the fan fiction, the t-shirts, and the toothpaste (not kidding on that last one; in fact, I saved 8 bucks by resisting the urge try it) the internet abounds in digital Austen projects which, frankly, is a bit overwhelming when one is trying to find a niche or, dare I say, conceive of something “original” to do.  Nevertheless, I soldiered on, sizing up the Austen internet footprint as best I could until, quite simply, I ran out of time.  The semester was about to start, and I still had no clue what we were going to do.

Deadline pressure is a powerful thing (for students and their professors) and in this instance it forced me into radical rethinking mode:  what if my lack of an idea was, in fact, an idea.  That is, I decided to make the problem I was having coming up with a DH project idea for this course the issue I would get students to research and think through.  Our goal would be to come up with an interesting, doable, long-term project by semester’s end.  I had failed, but I recalled failure is valued in the DH world, as is communal, collective endeavor.  This was going to work!

And so it did.  The students began thinking about this issue early in the semester, and worked in earnest on it in small groups at various times throughout, leading up to the last class which we devoted to brainstorming project ideas based on the criteria I had set out.  During that last 75-minute period I could barely keep up as I tried to capture their collective thinking on the white boards.

My recollection is that we defined and detailed 3 or 4  project ideas, discussed the potential value of each in both pedagogical and practical terms, and considered the “doability” factor of each with regard to available digital platforms and our, ahem, obvious lack of resources.

The “Annotations” idea easily won out.  Students felt that, although the editions of Austen’s novels that I order for the course include scholarly annotations, there was potential to do much more in that area.  Their idea, in effect, was to create electronic editions of Austen’s novels annotated by undergraduates for undergraduates.  We also noted that the digital world must offer a way to enhance the typical text-only glosses one finds in the footnotes of a print edition.  Adding visual material to such annotations where applicable–especially in the form of contemporary engravings, illustrations, and/or paintings–was keenly desired.  Of course, I quite liked the pedagogical implications:  this project would actively engage students in doing the research necessary to compile such annotations.  The project would also add another close-reading layer as students had to determine what words, phrases, or passages required annotation; they would learn about proper sources to use in seeking out relevant information for writing annotations; they would improve their digital literacy skills in vetting on-line sources and locating relevant images; and they would be creating an end-product with at least potential practical value beyond the classroom.

So here we are in Spring 2016 about to embark on the project.  Having a focus idea certainly helped speed things along; last Fall my colleague, Prof. Larry Hanley, introduced me to a web annotation tool called Hypothes.is  which offers the basic capabilities students defined in our end-o’-the-semester discussion last Spring.  A version of this annotation tool can be downloaded as a plug-in for self-hosted WordPress sites.  Now I was in familiar territory.  The first iteration of “Annotating Austen” was easy to build, but I expect this cohort of ENG 581 students will find ways to expand and improve the site as we begin work on Northanger Abbey this semester.