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10.10.2019 | ISS 2019 | ADWL Mainz
Critical Annotation Methods for Text and Images
A Practical and Theoretical Approach
Overview
- Philosophical Introduction
- Let’s start with some Etymology!
- Theoretical Foundation: Constitutive Parts of an Annotation
- Defining Annotation
- In Search of Annotations
- Annotating Texts
- Implicite and explicit Annotations
- Discussion
- Practice
- Annotating Images
- Differences between Text and Images
- Discussion
- Practice
- Literature
01
Philosophical Introduction
Let’s start with some Etymology! – Critique
- Ancient Greek krinein “to discern, to decide, to estimate, to judge”
- Age of Enlightenment
- Reflection on methodology
- Deep destructuring, Descartes’s Cogito
Kant's Critique
- What can I know?
- What should I do?
- What may I hope?
- What is the human being?
Decentering
“… it exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary
connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds. The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an animal creature, which after it has
been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe).” (Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 161–2)
Recentering
“Kant […] thus conclude[s] that all of our knowledge is restricted to the way in which the world necessarily appears to creatures like us – although we also remain free to think of the world in other ways, and
even must do so for the purposes of morality.” (Guyer, 33)
Critical Theory
“Theories arise from the interests of humans. [...] Depending on what torments us in the world and what we want to change, the picture that we make of it will shape itself” (Horkheimer in GS 2, 434)
A truly critical outlook has to acknowledge …
- … Human being’s necessary cultural, societal, bodily, conceptual, etc boundedness in regard to perception and knowledge.
- … the inherent and necessary connection between epistemological rigour and the moral imperative.
- … Human being’s insoluble damnation to choose and to act incassently, even through inaction.
Let’s start with some Etymology! – Method
- Ancient Greek meta “towards” and hodos “the way”, “the way towards s.th.”
- Latin analogue “via, regula” (regō + instr. Suffix -ula; cp. gr. kanon).
- Related to an algorithm.
- Semantic space ranging from “giving direction (of view, of motion)” over “providing a step-by-step manual” to “evaluating, measuring (an outcome)”.
“A process that is planned according to means and purposes, leading to technical skill in solving theoretical and practical tasks.”
(Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie, 876)
Critique by Method?
Synthesis occurs when, starting with the principles, we derive doctrines and tasks through composition. […] Analysis, on the other hand, occurs when we seek the
principles, with the help of which [said doctrines or tasks] become demonstrable or solvable, based on a given conclusion or a given task.
Leibniz, 194, citation follows Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie, vol. 2, 877.
Critique by Method?
- Aristotles Set of Causes
- Mill’s (Logical) Methods of Induction
- Bacon’s Idols of the Mind
- Husserl’s Methods of Phenomenological Reduction
Critique and Methods
Let’s start with some Etymology! – Annotation
- Educated term from Latin
- adnotо̄ < composed of ad, engl. to, towards s.th. and notо̄, eng. to mark, to attach a sign
- nо̄tus < nо̄scо̄, engl. known, experienced, understood
By means of the praxis of Annotating the annotating subject (un)consciously establishes a link between an intelligible object and a specific proposition that relates s.th. the subject has formerly (un)consciously established as
subjectively meaningful.
Constitutive parts of an Annotation
- is an intentional
act.
- is a distinguishing process of observation intertwined with an indicating process of cognition
- focuses on an object
- adresses a specific audience or recipients
- purpose
- subjective directionality and bound to an embodied, chronologically as well as spatially located agent
- contingent & deterministic, yet complex and autopoetic system (of signs, operations, and relations).
Centering the Individual
[Phenomenology is thus in the mode of] discovering the unexpected horizons within which the real finds itself, which is thus captured by the representative thinking, but also from the concrete, pre-predicative life,
starting from the body (innocent), starting from the culture (less innocent perhaps). Hands reach, turning of the head, speaking a language, [all] being the “sedimentation” of a story – all this transcendentally requires
contemplation and contemplated. In demonstrating that consciousness and the represented being emerge from an unrepresentable “context,” Husserl has cast doubt on the place of truth in representation. [...] The ideas
that transcend consciousness can not be separated from their genesis in through-and-through temporal consciousness. (Levinas, cited following Stegmaier, 38–9, see also 44–6)
Centering the Individual
When one introduces the observer, the speaker or the one to whom something is attributable, one relativizes the ontology. In fact, one must always carry the thought of an observer when one wants to say what the case
is, so one must always observe an observer, name an observer, designate a system reference when making statements about the world. […] We now always have to deal with a
description of the world, which filters out the presentation of the facts including purposes, readiness to act and the like by the reference to an observer. There is always the
question of who says that and who does it and from what system the world is seen so and not
otherwise. (Luhmann, 134)
Centering the Individual
The search for objectivity is […] laudable, but we should’nt forget that any objectivity, any explanation, […] theoretical modelling, presupposes the first-person
perspective as its precondition. […] [Every science is] a cultural formation. It is knowledge that is shared by a community of experiencing subjects and
which presupposes a triangulation of points of view or perspectives. This is also why the ususal opposition of first-person vs. third-person accounts is misleading. It makes
us forget that third-person scientific accounts are accomplished and generated by a community of conscious [first-person] subjects. […] [The 3P-view] is a view we can adopt on the world. Science [however] has its roots in the
lifeworld, […] [in] the prescientific sphere, and is performed by embodied and embedded subjects. (Zahavi, 53–4)
Interim conclusion
An objectively correct ‘one-size-fits-all’ type of Annotation does not exist. “Any understanding of reality is by definition perspectival. Effacing our perspective
does not bring us any closer to the world. It merely prevents us from understanding anything at all.” (Zahavi, 28) Thus every instantiation of Annotation as operation in practice ties in with a discursive web of prior
Annotations.
What is a Text
“The Text is a methodological field. […] The work rests in the hand, the text rests in the language.” (Barthes, 42)
“The text only manifests itself in the process of work, in the process of production.” (Barthes, 42)
“It is only a complex concept of text – that grasps the interplay of stability and unbounded movement of syntagmatic coherence and paradigmatic polyvalence – that can do justice to
the artful character of text.” (Martens, 107)
02
Looking for Annotations
Looking for Annotations!
- Author: Paul Média – License: CC-BY-SA – Quelle
Granularity
Questions
- What kind of structures, what kind of targets of Annotation may be perceived in the text?
- How would you model the perceived structures? Why would you do so?
- Please, focus on structural aspects first.
Example
Structual Granularity
- Potential targets => potential structural granularity (isormorphism)
- Text granularity: layers are Sections, chapters, text areas, Paragraphs, sentences, words, characters, semantic zero
- Computer system: Network architecture, file system and
file sections
- Granularity creates a coordinate system for annotations
Types of Annotation
- What types or subtypes of Annotation would you consider?
- How would you differentiate between the types?
Fundamental differentiation of Annotation
-
Historical and historicizable annotations (first degree observation)
- Modern Annotations (second degree observation) about historical
Annotations
- Foundational difference:
- 1) Annotations about Objects (that don’t necessarily need to be “scriptual” Annotations)
and
- 2) Annotations about Annotations.
Pause
10 Minuten
Question
Do you have priour experience with formal languages used for Annotation purposes?
03
Textual annotation
Implicit vs. Explicit
A(nno) D(omini) · 1557 · DES ·
SVN=/NABENDE · NA · DES · HILLIGEN · CREVTZES · DAGE · / DA · STARF · DE · ERSAME · /
BORGEMEST[ER] · LVDOLFF · RVSKEPLATE · DEM · / GOT · GNEDIG · VND · / [.....]ERTZIG · SY
· / AMEN ·
(INSCHRIFTEN mit Klammern)
Implicit vs. Explicit
(INSCHRIFT als XML)
Implicit vs. Explicit
A(nno) D(omini) · 1557 · DES ·
SVN=/NABENDE · NA · DES · HILLIGEN · CREVTZES · DAGE ·
Discussion
What might be advantages and disadvantages of either mode of Annotation?
Annotation as Kulturtechnik
Annotation covers a broad territory. It has been construed in many ways: as link
making, as path building, as commentary, as marking in or around existing text, as a
decentering of authority, as a record of reading and interpretation, or as community
memory.
Catherine C.Marshall: Toward an ecology of hypertext
annotation 1998
Each note is just one element that gets its quality from the network of references and referrals in the system.
Niklas Luhmann: Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen, 1981
Pause
10 Minuten
04
Image annotation
Let’s look for Annotations!
- License: Public Domain – Source
Simple, (not so) simple difference between text and image?
- often not as easily to differentiate
- overlapping spheres of meaning and blending of structures
- How to maintain Ambiguity without loosing Scholarly clarity?
Technical differences
Fry! Stay back! He's too powerful!
And yet you haven't said what I told you to say! How can any of us trust you? Say it
in Russian! Why, those are the Grunka-Lunkas! They work here in the Slurm factory.
Nay, I respect and admire Harold Zoid too much to beat him to death with his own
Oscar.
Ask her how her day was. I guess because my parents keep telling me to be more
ladylike. As though! No.
Stop! Don't shoot fire stick in space canoe! Cause explosive decompression!
- Author: Paul Média – Lizenz: CC-BY-SA – Quelle
Technical differences
- Author: Paul Média – Lizenz: CC-BY-SA – Quelle
Review Granularity
- Text granularity: layers are Sections, chapters, text areas, Paragraphs, sentences, words, characters, semantic zero
- Images: pixel coordinate system or vector coordinate system.
- Structures of operating systems and programms: file system and
file sections
An object’s granularity creates the
coordinate system in which an annotation may be located.
Some good advice!
- Thou shalt not save meta data within a rasterized image file by “painting” onto it, thus changing pixel values!
- Thou shalt use a standardized vocabulary for your meta data descriptions!
- Thou shalt save meta data in an external file!
- … or just save it in a specific meta data section
within the image file (xmp)!
Annotation in GeoJSON format
Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern.
Karl Marx, Thesen über Feuerbach, 11.
FINIS
Thanks!
Any Questions?
05
Ressources
Resources - Bibliography (Philosophical Introduction)
- R. Barthes: Vom Werk zum Text. In: S. Kammer [ed.]; R. Lüdeke [ed.]: Texte zur Theorie des Textes. Stuttgart 2005, p. 40–51.
- Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie. J. Mittelstraß [ed.]. Stuttgart 2004 (Vol. 1–4).
- P. Guyer: Kant. London 2014.
- M. Horkheimer: Gesammelte Schriften. Philosophische Frühschriften 1922–1932. A. Schmidt [ed.]; G. Schmid Noerr [ed.]. Frankfurt a.M. 1987 (Vol. 2).
- S. Kammer [ed.]; R. Lüdeke [ed.]: Texte zur Theorie des Textes. Stuttgart 2005.
- I. Kant: Critique of Practical Reason. P. Guyer [ed.]; A.W. Wood [ed.]: Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge 1992–, here the text is cited after the translation by T.K. Abbot (1879) from Wikisource, the page reference gives the modern English language edition.
- G.W. Leibniz: Philosophische Schriften 1. Cited following Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie (Vol. 2), p. 877.
- J.M. Lotman: Der Begriff Text. In: S. Kammer [ed.]; R. Lüdeke [ed.]: Texte zur Theorie des Textes. Stuttgart 2005, p.26–36.
- N. Luhmann: Einführung in die Systemtheorie. Heidelberg 2017.
- G. Martens: Was ist ein Text? Ansätze zur Bestimmung eines
Leitbegriffs der Textphilologie. In: S. Kammer [ed.]; R. Lüdeke [ed.]: Texte zur Theorie des Textes. Stuttgart 2005, p. 94–113.
- J.P. Sartre: Der Existentialismus ist ein Humanismus. Hamburg 2010.
- W. Stegmaier: Emmanuel Levinas zur Einführung. Hamburg 2013.
- Zahavi: Phenomenology. The Basics. London 2018.
Resources - Literature
- MacWright, Tom: More than you ever wanted to know about GeoJSON, URL: https://macwright.org/2015/03/23/geojson-second-bite.html, Abruf am 08.10.2018
- Marshall, Catherine C.: Toward an ecology of hypertext annotation, in: HYPERTEXT '98 Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia : links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems: Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, USA — June 20-24, 1998. New York 1998, S. 40-49.
-
Luhmann, Niklas: Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen, in: H. Baier et al. (Hrsg.): Öffentliche Meinung und sozialer Wandel / Public Opinion and Social Change. Opladen 1981, S. 222-228.
- TaDiRAH - Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities: Annotating, URL:
http://tadirah.dariah.eu/vocab/index.php?tema=22&/annotating, Abruf am
08.10.2018
- Pomerantz, Jeffrey: Metadata. Cambridge 2016.
- Rapp, Andrea: Manuelle und automatische Annotation, in: F. Jannidis et al. (Hrsg.),
Digital Humanities. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart 2017, S. 253–267.
- Vogeler, Georg und Sahle, Patrick: XML. In: Jannides et al.: Digital Humanities.
Eine Einführung. Stuttgart 2017, S. 128–146.