Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4.1 Main Conceptual Activities
Making notes and annotations is a substantial part of reading processes. Opposed to
what we intuitively understand by reading - deciphering words and phrases and ul-
timately meaning - reading documents frequently comprises writing as well. Com-
menting, underlining and highlighting a document during reading supports better
understanding, critical thinking as well as remembering the thoughts the reader had.
Adler et al. call this process active reading [2]. As Adler notes, “the physical act of
writing, with your own hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your
mind and preserves them better in your memory”. Annotations and notes are not
only central to reading but also important for efficiently attending meetings or lec-
tures. Psychological research shows that notetaking plays an important role in learn-
ing processes and has been proven to be a factor positively related to students' aca-
demic achievement [58, 115]. Taking personal notes or annotating handouts stimu-
lates attendees to actively follow the lecture, to consciously select important content,
and to rephrase it in their own words. Moreover, notes and annotations have a re-
minding effect during review after class [59].
In addition to active reading, it is crucial for successful knowledge acquisition
to structure the entire problem domain, to abstract and to establish relationships
between concepts. The resulting structural knowledge facilitates recall and com-
prehension and is essential to problem solving [51]. For this purpose, linking and
tagging documents are highly relevant activities. These can transform an unsorted
and possibly confusing collection of a large number of disparate documents to a
unified and well-structured document space.
In practice, annotating, linking and tagging go in hand and complement each
other. When reading a document, the knowledge worker would for example make
handwritten annotations to highlight important passages and to add some clarifying
details. Moreover, he or she would add a reference to another document which cov-
ers a particular aspect in more detail. When reading this other document, he or she
would make some more annotations before tagging this other document as important
and finally going back to the first document.
While there are well-established practices for annotating, referencing and struc-
turing paper documents, these activities are harder to perform with current technol-
ogy for digital documents. In particular, the transitions between printed and digital
documents are not well supported. Notes and annotations made on paper cannot
be easily digitized and it is difficult and time-consuming to create references be-
tween printed and digital documents. Moreover, while it has become common to
tag documents on the Web, these systems cannot be used for tagging content that
is available on paper. CoScribe offers cross-media support for annotating, linking
and tagging printed and digital documents. These activities enable the knowledge
worker to read and understand documents and then to relate and abstract them in
order to gain structural knowledge of the problem domain.
Annotating, linking and tagging are generic activities, each of them serving a
large number of possible tasks. Therefore CoScribe is not tailored to one specific
purpose. Instead, it can be considered as a toolset for document-based knowledge
