User annotations
One of the recommendations made by external participants at early OCVE workshops was the inclusion of more scholarly content than had originally been envisaged, in the form of detailed commentary on the sources themselves, on the philological significance of the variants revealed through the juxtaposition of sources, and on the interpretive issues arising from those variants. The project team incorporated this suggestion within the pilot itself, whereas other recommendations were addressed for the first time in Phase 1, including the implementation of personal annotation tools.
Scholarly commentary written by members of the OCVE team exists at several levels within the Phase 1 resource: Overviews, Source descriptions, and Key features and Bar-level Commentary. The fact that the scholarly material is intentionally selective is consistent with the aims of the OCVE project in general, specifically, the creation of a flexible 'dynamic edition' produced not by a fixed body of editors but rather through an individual user's creative interaction with the constituent sources.
In addition to the scholarly text, personal annotations can now be added by each and every user. These are fashioned, at a low level, upon the model developed for the OCVE pilot study. Registration is required in order for end users to be able to create annotations, which can either be publicly visible (i.e. available to any user of the web resource, whether registered or not) or private (i.e. visible only to the user-creator). The annotations themselves employ a standard client-side, rich-text editor which allows the user to express basic formatting and structure in their annotation (including the creation of links), which is then stored as XHTML in the OCVE database. Each annotation can additionally be given a title, and each user's 'My OCVE' page offers a quick overview of the annotations created within the system.
One of our key aims in developing the web-based annotation mechanism in Phase 1 was to ensure that the process of creating annotations was as cognitively undemanding as possible (for discussion see Bradley and Vetch 2007), and primarily for this reason we decided to make annotations attachable at the level of the bar only rather than to specific coordinates. This allowed us to solve a further problem: the development of an interaction model sufficiently expressive to allow users easily to select multiple sources to which they want to apply an annotation. Users simply click the bar images of the sources to select those to which they wish their annotations to be relevant (or click a second time to unselect).
Full instructions about how to create user annotations – whether private or public – are given in the User Guide.