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Article
Publication date: 23 November 2018

Chih-Ming Chen, Yung-Ting Chen and Chen-Yu Liu

An automatic text annotation system (ATAS) that can collect resources from different databases through Linked Data (LD) for automatically annotating ancient texts was developed in…

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Abstract

Purpose

An automatic text annotation system (ATAS) that can collect resources from different databases through Linked Data (LD) for automatically annotating ancient texts was developed in this study to support digital humanities research. It allows the humanists referring to resources from diverse databases when interpreting ancient texts as well as provides a friendly text annotation reader for humanists interpreting ancient text through reading. The paper aims to discuss whether the ATAS is helpful to support digital humanities research or not.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on the quasi-experimental design, the ATAS developed in this study and MARKUS semi-ATAS were compared whether the significant differences in the reading effectiveness and technology acceptance for supporting humanists interpreting ancient text of the Ming dynasty’s collections existed or not. Additionally, lag sequential analysis was also used to analyze users’ operation behaviors on the ATAS. A semi-structured in-depth interview was also applied to understand users’ opinions and perception of using the ATAS to interpret ancient texts through reading.

Findings

The experimental results reveal that the ATAS has higher reading effectiveness than MARKUS semi-ATAS, but not reaching the statistically significant difference. The technology acceptance of the ATAS is significantly higher than that of MARKUS semi-ATAS. Particularly, the function comparison of the two systems shows that the ATAS presents more perceived ease of use on the functions of term search, connection to source websites and adding annotation than MARKUS semi-ATAS. Furthermore, the reading interface of ATAS is simple and understandable and is more suitable for reading than MARKUS semi-ATAS. Among all the considered LD sources, Moedict, which is an online Chinese dictionary, was confirmed as the most helpful one.

Research limitations/implications

This study adopted Jieba Chinese parser to perform the word segmentation process based on a parser lexicon for the Chinese ancient texts of the Ming dynasty’s collections. The accuracy of word segmentation to a lexicon-based Chinese parser is limited due to ignoring the grammar and semantics of ancient texts. Moreover, the original parser lexicon used in Jieba Chinese parser only contains the modern words. This will reduce the accuracy of word segmentation for Chinese ancient texts. The two limitations that affect Jieba Chinese parser to correctly perform the word segmentation process for Chinese ancient texts will significantly affect the effectiveness of using ATAS to support digital humanities research. This study thus proposed a practicable scheme by adding new terms into the parser lexicon based on humanists’ self-judgment to improve the accuracy of word segmentation of Jieba Chinese parser.

Practical implications

Although some digital humanities platforms have been successfully developed to support digital humanities research for humanists, most of them have still not provided a friendly digital reading environment to support humanists on interpreting texts. For this reason, this study developed an ATAS that can automatically retrieve LD sources from different databases on the Internet to supply rich annotation information on reading texts to help humanists interpret texts. This study brings digital humanities research to a new ground.

Originality/value

This study proposed a novel ATAS that can automatically annotate useful information on an ancient text to increase the readability of the ancient text based on LD sources from different databases, thus helping humanists obtain a deeper and broader understanding in the ancient text. Currently, there is no this kind of tool developed for humanists to support digital humanities research.

Article
Publication date: 30 March 2012

José L. Navarro‐Galindo and José Samos

Nowadays, the use of WCMS (web content management systems) is widespread. The conversion of this infrastructure into its semantic equivalent (semantic WCMS) is a critical issue…

Abstract

Purpose

Nowadays, the use of WCMS (web content management systems) is widespread. The conversion of this infrastructure into its semantic equivalent (semantic WCMS) is a critical issue, as this enables the benefits of the semantic web to be extended. The purpose of this paper is to present a FLERSA (Flexible Range Semantic Annotation) for flexible range semantic annotation.

Design/methodology/approach

A FLERSA is presented as a user‐centred annotation tool for Web content expressed in natural language. The tool has been built in order to illustrate how a WCMS called Joomla! can be converted into its semantic equivalent.

Findings

The development of the tool shows that it is possible to build a semantic WCMS through a combination of semantic components and other resources such as ontologies and emergence technologies, including XML, RDF, RDFa and OWL.

Practical implications

The paper provides a starting‐point for further research in which the principles and techniques of the FLERSA tool can be applied to any WCMS.

Originality/value

The tool allows both manual and automatic semantic annotations, as well as providing enhanced search capabilities. For manual annotation, a new flexible range markup technique is used, based on the RDFa standard, to support the evolution of annotated Web documents more effectively than XPointer. For automatic annotation, a hybrid approach based on machine learning techniques (Vector‐Space Model + n‐grams) is used to determine the concepts that the content of a Web document deals with (from an ontology which provides a taxonomy), based on previous annotations that are used as a training corpus.

Book part
Publication date: 24 April 2020

Deborah N. Brewis and Sarah Taylor Silverwood

Annotation is a practice that is familiar to many of us, and yet it is a practice so natural that it is hard to pin down its characteristics, to find where its edges are, and…

Abstract

Annotation is a practice that is familiar to many of us, and yet it is a practice so natural that it is hard to pin down its characteristics, to find where its edges are, and identify what it does for us. In this piece, we use reflections on the practices of annotation in four fields of work: academia, software engineering, medical sonography and visual art as a point of departure to theorise annotation as a set of practices that bridge reading, writing and thinking. We think about annotation being performative and consider what and how it brings into being. Revealing hidden practices in our working lives, such as annotation, helps us to understand how knowledge comes to be created, disseminated, legitimated and popularised. To this end, we make the practices of annotation involved in writing the present piece visible in an effort to write differently in management and organisation studies, unpicking and exposing it as ever dialogical and unfinished.

Details

Writing Differently
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83867-337-6

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 6 November 2017

Chih-Ming Chen and Ming-Yueh Tsay

Collaboratively annotating digital texts allow users to add valued information, share ideas and create knowledge. Most importantly, annotated content can help users obtain a…

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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 with displayed 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 digital curation approach which has a high degree of satisfaction on attraction effect to visitors, an innovative crowdsourcing platform that 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 scholars to annotate the texts with distinct interpretation and viewpoints on an ancient map, as well as discuss with other humanities scholars to stimulate discussion on more issues.

Details

The Electronic Library, vol. 35 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0264-0473

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 3 June 2019

Chih-Ming Chen and Chung Chang

With the rapid development of digital humanities, some digital humanities platforms have been successfully developed to support digital humanities research for humanists. However…

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Abstract

Purpose

With the rapid development of digital humanities, some digital humanities platforms have been successfully developed to support digital humanities research for humanists. However, most of them have still not provided a friendly digital reading environment and practicable social network analysis tool to support humanists on interpreting texts and exploring characters’ social network relationships. Moreover, the advancement of digitization technologies for the retrieval and use of Chinese ancient books is arising an unprecedented challenge and opportunity. For these reasons, this paper aims to present a Chinese ancient books digital humanities research platform (CABDHRP) to support historical China studies. In addition to providing digital archives, digital reading, basic search and advanced search functions for Chinese ancient books, this platform still provides two novel functions that can more effectively support digital humanities research, including an automatic text annotation system (ATAS) for interpreting texts and a character social network relationship map tool (CSNRMT) for exploring characters’ social network relationships.

Design/methodology/approach

This study adopted DSpace, an open-source institutional repository system, to serve as a digital archives system for archiving scanned images, metadata, and full texts to develop the CABDHRP for supporting digital humanities (DH) research. Moreover, the ATAS developed in the CABDHRP used the Node.js framework to implement the system’s front- and back-end services, as well as application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by different databases, such as China Biographical Database (CBDB) and TGAZ, used to retrieve the useful linked data (LD) sources for interpreting ancient texts. Also, Neo4j which is an open-source graph database management system was used to implement the CSNRMT of the CABDHRP. Finally, JavaScript and jQuery were applied to develop a monitoring program embedded in the CABDHRP to record the use processes from humanists based on xAPI (experience API). To understand the research participants’ perception when interpreting the historical texts and characters’ social network relationships with the support of ATAS and CSNRMT, semi-structured interviews with 21 research participants were conducted.

Findings

An ATAS embedded in the reading interface of CABDHRP can collect resources from different databases through LD for automatically annotating ancient texts to support digital humanities research. It allows the humanists to refer to resources from diverse databases when interpreting ancient texts, as well as provides a friendly text annotation reader for humanists to interpret ancient text through reading. Additionally, the CSNRMT provided by the CABDHRP can semi-automatically identify characters’ names based on Chinese word segmentation technology and humanists’ support to confirm and analyze characters’ social network relationships from Chinese ancient books based on visualizing characters’ social networks as a knowledge graph. The CABDHRP not only can stimulate humanists to explore new viewpoints in a humanistic research, but also can promote the public to emerge the learning interest and awareness of Chinese ancient books.

Originality/value

This study proposed a novel CABDHRP that provides the advanced features, including the automatic word segmentation of Chinese text, automatic Chinese text annotation, semi-automatic character social network analysis and user behavior analysis, that are different from other existed digital humanities platforms. Currently, there is no this kind of digital humanities platform developed for humanists to support digital humanities research.

Details

The Electronic Library , vol. 37 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0264-0473

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 3 August 2015

Yi-Fan Liu, Wu-Yuin Hwang and Sherry Chen

This paper aims to examine how gender differences influence students’ reactions to the use of the annotatable multimedia e-reader (AME). To reach this aim, we develop an AME where…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine how gender differences influence students’ reactions to the use of the annotatable multimedia e-reader (AME). To reach this aim, we develop an AME where various annotation tools are provided to help students learn English in-class and after-class.

Design/methodology/approach

An empirical study was conducted with 63 fifth-grade students from an elementary school. A pre-test and post-test were used to identify their prior knowledge and learning achievement, respectively. A questionnaire was applied to identify participants’ perceptions towards the AME.

Findings

The results show that students’ post-test scores are significantly related to after-class behaviour, instead of in-class behaviour. Females prefer to use the text annotation and teachers’ voice, but it is voice annotation that is beneficial to improve their learning achievement. Conversely, males prefer to use the text-to-speech only, but it is text annotation that is helpful to improve their learning achievement. Additionally, the ease of use affects males’ intention to use the AME to learn English after-class while it has no effects on females.

Originality/value

This study not only shows the importance of gender differences but also demonstrates the essence of after-class learning behaviour. More importantly, a framework is proposed to support designers to develop e-readers that can accommodate the preferences of females and males.

Details

The Electronic Library, vol. 33 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0264-0473

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 15 August 2018

Heng-Li Yang and August F.Y. Chao

The purpose of this paper is to propose sentiment annotation at sentence level to reduce information overloading while reading product/service reviews in the internet.

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to propose sentiment annotation at sentence level to reduce information overloading while reading product/service reviews in the internet.

Design/methodology/approach

The keyword-based sentiment analysis is applied for highlighting review sentences. An experiment is conducted for demonstrating its effectiveness.

Findings

A prototype is built for highlighting tourism review sentences in Chinese with positive or negative sentiment polarity. An experiment results indicates that sentiment annotation can increase information quality and user’s intention to read tourism reviews.

Research limitations/implications

This study has made two major contributions: proposing the approach of adding sentiment annotation at sentence level of review texts for assisting decision-making; validating the relationships among the information quality constructs. However, in this study, sentiment analysis was conducted on a limited corpus; future research may try a larger corpus. Besides, the annotation system was built on the tourism data. Future studies might try to apply to other areas.

Practical implications

If the proposed annotation systems become popular, both tourists and attraction providers would obtain benefits. In this era of smart tourism, tourists could browse through the huge amount of internet information more quickly. Attraction providers could understand what are the strengths and weaknesses of their facilities more easily. The application of this sentiment analysis is possible for other languages, especially for non-spaced languages.

Originality/value

Facing large amounts of data, past researchers were engaged in automatically constructing a compact yet meaningful abstraction of the texts. However, users have different positions and purposes. This study proposes an alternative approach to add sentiment annotation at sentence level for assisting users.

Details

Online Information Review, vol. 42 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1468-4527

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 2 September 2014

Muhamed Fajkovic and Lennart Björneborn

The purpose of this paper is to investigate readers’ annotations in library books and attitudes towards marginalia among library users. In particular, the study discusses how…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate readers’ annotations in library books and attitudes towards marginalia among library users. In particular, the study discusses how marginalia function as reader-to-reader communication.

Design/methodology/approach

The study used data collected from both public library and university library collections, as well as a user survey conducted among library users. The empirical results are discussed in relation to theories of affordances, in order to understand what characterizes the socio-physical realm within which marginalia exist (RQ1), and what specific conditions make marginalia possible as a communicative act between readers (RQ2).

Findings

The study suggests that marginalia in library books are mainly by-products of reading/studying processes. The user survey depicts an overall picture of ambiguous attitudes towards marginalia. It is argued that marginalia seen as communication rely heavily on the proximity of the context and the permanence of the physical medium. Three distinctive categories are proposed for classifying marginalia according to their relationship with the text: embedded; evaluative; extratextual. In spite of being an often unwanted communication, marginalia thus still function as an additional layer to the main message of the primary text.

Research limitations/implications

The findings are indicative pointing to follow-up studies that may further validate them. The study contributes to a referential frame for future studies on the subject.

Originality/value

The study addresses factual and communicative aspects of marginalia less covered in previous research, thus providing a basis for further research also in relation to designing affordances for annotations in e-books.

Details

Journal of Documentation, vol. 70 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0022-0418

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 25 October 2021

Jinju Chen and Shiyan Ou

The purpose of this paper is to semantically annotate the content of digital images with the use of Semantic Web technologies and thus facilitate retrieval, integration and…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to semantically annotate the content of digital images with the use of Semantic Web technologies and thus facilitate retrieval, integration and knowledge discovery.

Design/Methodology/Approach

After a review and comparison of the existing semantic annotation models for images and a deep analysis of the characteristics of the content of images, a multi-dimensional and hierarchical general semantic annotation framework for digital images was proposed. On this basis, taking histories images, advertising images and biomedical images as examples, by integrating the characteristics of images in these specific domains with related domain knowledge, the general semantic annotation framework for digital images was customized to form a domain annotation ontology for the images in a specific domain. The application of semantic annotation of digital images, such as semantic retrieval, visual analysis and semantic reuse, were also explored.

Findings

The results showed that the semantic annotation framework for digital images constructed in this paper provided a solution for the semantic organization of the content of images. On this basis, deep knowledge services such as semantic retrieval, visual analysis can be provided.

Originality/Value

The semantic annotation framework for digital images can reveal the fine-grained semantics in a multi-dimensional and hierarchical way, which can thus meet the demand for enrichment and retrieval of digital images.

Details

The Electronic Library , vol. 39 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0264-0473

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 19 June 2017

Mohammed Ourabah Soualah, Yassine Ait Ali Yahia, Abdelkader Keita and Abderrezak Guessoum

The purpose of this paper is to obtain online access to the digitised Arabic manuscripts images, which need to use a catalogue. The bibliographic cataloguing is unsuitable for old…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to obtain online access to the digitised Arabic manuscripts images, which need to use a catalogue. The bibliographic cataloguing is unsuitable for old Arabic manuscripts, and it is imperative to establish a new cataloguing model. In the research, the authors propose a new cataloguing model based on manuscript annotations and transcriptions. This model can be an effective solution to dynamic catalogue old Arabic manuscripts. In this field, the authors used the automatic extraction of the metadata that is based on the structural similarity of the documents.

Design/methodology/approach

This work is based on experimental methodology. The whole proposed concepts and formulas were tested for validation. This, allows the authors to make concise conclusions.

Findings

Cataloguing old Arabic manuscripts faces problem of unavailability of information. However, this information may be found in another place in a copy of the original manuscript. Thus, cataloguing Arabic manuscript cannot be done in one time, it is a continual process which require information updating. The idea is to make a pre-cataloguing of a manuscript, then try to complete and improve it through a specific platform. Consequently, in the research work, the authors propose a new cataloguing model, which the authors call “Dynamic cataloguing”.

Research limitations/implications

The success of the proposed model is confronted with the involvement of all actors of the model. It is based on the conviction and the motivation of actors of the collaborative platform.

Practical implications

The model can be used in several cataloguing fields, where the encoding model is based on XML. The model is innovative and implements a smart cataloguing model. The model is useful by using a web platform. It allows an automatic update of a catalogue.

Social implications

The model prompts the user to participate and enrich the catalogue. The user could improve his social status from a passive to an active.

Originality/value

The dynamic cataloguing model is a new concept. It has never been proposed in the literature until now. The proposed cataloguing model is based on automatic extraction of metadata from user annotations/transcription. It is a smart system which automatically updates or fills the catalogue with the extracted metadata.

1 – 10 of over 3000