Annotations for students
Hi. I'm a college lit teacher and have been thinking about doing footnotes and annotations of the sort most editions for college students supply for some PG classics, so my students could have the usual kinds of help reading them, and print them out, mark them up, bring them to class for discussion, etc. (I think the lack of notes. not the quality of the texts themselves, is currently the main barrier to more widespread use of PG texts in classes.) If I did this, I'd want to make the annotations available free for anybody else who wanted to use them for teaching (or just to read). Some form of structured markup that allowed people to reformat and print to different sizes and devices in the future would be nice, rather than pdfs... I've looked at the archive, and haven't found any discussion of this topic; any suggestions or advice about such a project (or where to look next) would be appreciated. Thanks, Thad
On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 06:29:04PM -0700, Thad Curtz wrote:
Hi. I'm a college lit teacher and have been thinking about doing footnotes and annotations of the sort most editions for college students supply for some PG classics, so my students could have the usual kinds of help reading them, and print them out, mark them up, bring them to class for discussion, etc. (I think the lack of notes. not the quality of the texts themselves, is currently the main barrier to more widespread use of PG texts in classes.) If I did this, I'd want to make the annotations available free for anybody else who wanted to use them for teaching (or just to read). Some form of structured markup that allowed people to reformat and print to different sizes and devices in the future would be nice, rather than pdfs...
I've looked at the archive, and haven't found any discussion of this topic; any suggestions or advice about such a project (or where to look next) would be appreciated.
It has been discussed a few times before, but perhaps not on this list. You are, of course, welcome to create annotated versions for yourself, and to make them available through your own website. That's great, and we hope it works well for you. However, we will not accept them back for posting into PG as revised texts. If we did, we'd be inundated with Creationists annotating Darwin, Darwinists annotating Genesis, and every nutball who would be instantly removed from the lobby of any publisher wanting to add their essays on The Meaning Of . . . Believe me, they're out there. I've dealt with a few. It's not a practical proposition. Once you allow one person to annotate our texts, you have to give others an equal right, and the whole thing devolves instantly. As for formatting, while XML is theoretically ideal, there are practical issues. Some members of this list are breaking ground in this area, and may be able to make suggestions. Nearly all current markup work uses HTML + CSS, which is pretty flexible, and, as a practical matter, HTML is the Universal Input at the moment -- it can be immediately converted to PDA formats, PDF and so on. If you choose your conventions carefully, HTML or XHTML can be as well-structured as you like. jim
On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Thad Curtz wrote:
Hi. I'm a college lit teacher and have been thinking about doing footnotes and annotations of the sort most editions for college students supply for some PG classics, so my students could have the usual kinds of help reading them, and print them out, mark them up, bring them to class for discussion, etc.
I hadn't thought about this before, but I can see the sense in Jim's argument. On one hand, I think it's too bad if PG misses out on a well-researched, comprehensive set of annotations. On the other hand, I can see it that in the larger scheme of things it's probably better to stick with our practise of only adding contemparary material if it has already been published in "dead-tree" form. Thad: If you are looking for some other longer-term home for this type of text, one possibility may be Wikibooks. See: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Annotated_texts Thanks, Andrew
Hello all. I'm sorry, but I'm a little confused about something here. PG has an offer from a teacher to annotate editions of PG classics which are already available. Greg, Jim and Andrew all seem to agree that such notes should not be included in PG. This is too bad since I would like to see such annotating. However, what about a book by O'Henry? There are two editions of this. One without notes and one with notes by Joe who posted it. I think the precident has been set to allow books with contemporary notes added. Why not just assign them a new etext number? book 17,000 for example could be a Mark Twain book with footnotes added. If this is unacceptable, why not just have a xxxxx-notes file or directory? For example: 17000.txt, 17000-h.htm, 17000-notes.txt Or, the same as above but 17000-notes/ would be a separate directory with 17000.txt that has notes added. Hopefully this is clear. Is there any reason why this can't be done? This is how page images are done, right?
On 16 Aug 2005, at 18:29, Thad Curtz wrote:
Hi. I'm a college lit teacher and have been thinking about doing footnotes and annotations of the sort most editions for college students supply for some PG classics, so my students could have the usual kinds of help reading them, and print them out, mark them up, bring them to class for discussion, etc. (I think the lack of notes. not the quality of the texts themselves, is currently the main barrier to more widespread use of PG texts in classes.) If I did this, I'd want to make the annotations available free for anybody else who wanted to use them for teaching (or just to read). Some form of structured markup that allowed people to reformat and print to different sizes and devices in the future would be nice, rather than pdfs...
I've looked at the archive, and haven't found any discussion of this topic; any suggestions or advice about such a project (or where to look next) would be appreciated.
I would assume this works the way the creation of any other educational material works: teachers sit down and write the stuff. At least, that is the impression I got from looking at text books and annotated editions. What did your fellow teachers suggest? -- branko collin collin@xs4all.nl
Sounds like a wonderful project! Even though PG can't host it, don't let that dampen your enthusiasm. There are lots of other ways to make the results available for free.
Some form of structured markup that allowed people to reformat and print to different sizes and devices in the future would be nice, rather than pdfs...
Agreed. Here's the challenge: if you make annotations within the existing PG files, then it's difficult to just see the annotations. If you keep the annotations separate, it's hard to see them in context. The ideal solution would be a tiny bit of automation (perhaps created by a student if techie stuff isn't your thing). Then you could keep the annotations separate, and just add small markers to the original text. Simple scripts could do things like: - format the annotations on their own - insert the annotations into the text, preferably with appropriate HTML wrapper that lets readers show/hide using CSS (style sheets) or JavaScript. As others have noted, HTML or the newer XHTML is ideal here. (If a specific "book" that you need doesn't exist in HTML, I'll bet some people here would help do at least a basic conversion.)
I've looked at the archive, and haven't found any discussion of this topic; any suggestions or advice about such a project (or where to look next) would be appreciated.
If you want to take a more ambitious approach, review the list for discussions on "PGTEI", "TEI" and "XML". But, effective use of these is likely to be more work. (It's not overly difficult given the appropriate technical background, so it depends on what sort of resources you have available.) Note for the record that highly-structured XML "originals" would let you "point" each annotation to the appropriate place in a document without altering the original (using XPATH). That's great in theory, but is again probably too much tech work for your project. (I'd be happy for an XPATH expert to show that I'm wrong; perhaps it's easier than I think to point to a specific location in a typical PG HTML file, presumably using Tidy and such to convert to XHTML.) -- Cheers, Scott S. Lawton http://Classicosm.com/ - classic books http://ProductArchitect.com/ - consulting
participants (6)
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Andrew Sly -
Branko Collin -
Jim Tinsley -
Scott Lawton -
Thad Curtz -
Tony Baechler