When NPR used a new web annotation tool to live-annotate and fact-check the first presidential debate in 2016, the site brought in record traffic, with 7,413,000 pageviews from 6,011,000 users; 22 percent of visitors stayed all the way to the end, something worth noting in an era when quick, shareable information dominates the news.
“We think that people were coming for the transcript and then getting the annotation, which we were fine with,” joked David Eads during an interview with the Duke Reporters’ Lab. Eads was part of the NPR visuals team throughout the annotation project, and now works as a news applications developer at ProPublica Illinois. He held that skimming through long documents and transcripts, as opposed to reading excerpts or summaries of what people said, is the new way that people like to get their news and information online, hence why NPR’s monster of a debate transcript was so popular.
Whether or not that’s true, the success that some new web annotation tools have recently had when used by major newspaper companies is something to which we should pay attention. NPR’s live transcript was one example. Another is Genius, which started out as a website called Rap Genius that allows users to annotate the lyrics to rap songs, and has since expanded to include an annotation tool that’s being utilized consistently by The Washington Post. Every speech, statement or debate transcript published in an article on the Post gets annotated by a handful of journalists via the Genius sidebar, and this has clearly been working. According to Poynter, “engaged time on posts annotated using Genius are generally between three and four times better than a normal article.”
It makes sense that consumers would want to read original statements and primary sources, given current skepticism of the media and allegations being thrown around by politicians and social media bots. Web annotation provides journalists with a tool that allows them to be present while readers go through these documents, not to push an agenda or argument, but to provide expert context, analysis and background for their audience.
Web annotation may be limited in what it allows journalists to actually do; The Washington Post mostly only uses it to make it easier for journalists to comment on speeches and statements. But other organizations have gotten creative with their own annotation tools, like The New York Times, which annotated the U.S. Constitution, and FiveThirtyEight, which wrote annotated “Perfect Presidential Stump Speeches” for both Republicans and Democrats. And many of them, including Vox and The Atlantic, are utilizing web annotation in different styles and formats for the same purpose as The Washington Post: a tool their journalists can use to break down speeches and debate transcripts into something more digestible, whole, and transparent for readers.
The first few attempts at all-powerful web annotation programs similar to Genius were epic failures. Third Voice was a browser plug-in created by a team of Singaporean engineers in 1998 that allowed users to annotate anything on any website. hough it showed promise in fostering intellectual conversation on tense topics online, it couldn’t shake its reputation of being a destructive method of Internet graffiti. A few years later in 2009, Google came up with Google Sidewiki that essentially did the same thing and encountered similar problems, as well as complications with advertisements and user communities. It lasted two years.
It’s no surprise that when you give the greater online community proverbial markers with which to annotate the entire internet, things go badly. It essentially becomes another YouTube comment section in which people can say and do whatever they want — except they can do it directly on top of a paragraph in a news article, which horrified many website owners.
But when the power to annotate is given to an expert (such as David Victor, co-chair of the Brookings Initiative on Energy and Climate and global policy professor at the University of California San Diego), in a specific setting (such as Trump’s Paris Climate Agreement speech, posted on Vox), the resulting article is an archive of knowledge and information that allows readers to know not only exactly what was said, but also what it really meant and why it matters.
An old example of annotation that I did find interesting to look back on was the first-ever instance of something being annotated: Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice. Gardner was apparently frustrated by how much of Lewis Carroll’s clever genius was being missed in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as many of the witty jokes Carroll made were strict references to Oxford and to the Liddell family (whose daughter Alice inspired the novel). In the introduction of The Annotated Alice, Gardner remarks that “in the case of Alice we are dealing with a very curious, complicated kind of nonsense, written for British readers of another century, and we need to know a great many things that are not a part of the text if we wish to capture its full wit and flavor.”
If you ask me, “a curious, complicated kind of nonsense” also sounds like an appropriate way to describe most of today’s political discourse. American citizens don’t know how to tell what is true and what is false, what is being exaggerated or made up, and what agendas these claims are trying to serve. And with social media setting such a complicated, manipulated stage for information to spread, it’s becoming increasingly harder to objectively assess the news.
Web annotation isn’t the answer to all of these problems, but it’s a nice way to start breaking down the primary sources, original statements and speech and debate transcripts. When used carefully, as NPR and The Washington Post have proved is possible, it allows journalists to present information in a transparent, natural way. The role of a journalist is, after all, to present complicated, sometimes nonsensical happenings in a way that an audience can understand, and if there’s a way to make that education easier and more entertaining, it should be welcomed.
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