Annotation

Legal texts play an essential role in the organisation, be it public or private where each
actor must be aware of, and comply with regulations. However, because of the difficulties of the legal domain, the actors prefer to rely on the expert rather than resorting to search for the regulation in a collection of documents. In this paper, we use a rule-based approach based on the contextual exploration method for the semantic annotation of Algerian legal texts written in Arabic language. We are interested in the specification of the semantic information of the provision types: obligation, permission and prohibition, and the arguments role and action. The preliminary experiment presented promising results for the specification of provision types.

New social annotation practices have the potential to become a “signature pedagogy” (Shulman 2005) for educators in literary studies, because social annotation encapsulates both the expected learning outcomes and the underlying value commitments of literature education. We give an account of a project conducted by colleagues at the Education University of Hong Kong, during which colleagues explored social annotation technologies in literary studies courses. After implementing social annotation in our courses, instructors held roundtable discussions, collected surveys and conducted focus group interviews. Basing our interpretation of these data on Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading and writing, we propose that social annotation can help students engage with literary texts more effectively by showing them how to move toward an aesthetic mode of reading. Students participating in social annotation, moreover, understood its application to literary studies in ways that directly reproduced Rosenblatt’s account of literary interpretation.

Over the past three decades, the history of reading has become an increasingly lively field of scholarship. Important case studies have documented the freedom that individual readers have enjoyed in handling their books. On a structural level, however, the scholarship has been hampered by limited access to an inherently fragmented body of evidence. This article introduces a new research project, Annotated Books Online (ABO), which aims to provide a platform for the study of manuscript annotations in early modern printed books. ABO offers an open-access research environment where scholars and students can collect and view new evidence, as well as collaborate on transcriptions, translations, and new research initiatives. To illuminate the promising potential of new research on marginalia and adumbrate
the challenges ahead, the second part of this article offers a case study of three intriguing annotated copies of Homer, once owned by the German reformer Philipp Melanchthon (Columbia University Library, Plimpton 880 1517 H37).

The process of transcribing and annotating non-manual features presents challenges for sign language researchers. This paper describes the approach used by our research team to integrate the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) with the EUDICO Linguistic Annotator (ELAN) program to allow us to more accurately and efficiently code non-manual features. Preliminary findings are presented which demonstrate that this approach is useful for a fuller description of facial expressions.

In the article, we will present our experiences with, and problems that we came across while, working on a multilingual corpus of speech data (Polish and German) and conducting a pragmalinguistic and suprasegmental analysis of it. Furthermore, we will present some reflections on the notions of parallelity and comparability in this context. Creating corpora of spoken language constitutes a great challenge for the researcher due to its elusive nature. Speech data can be accessed by the researcher either in the form of transcripts of audio/video recordings (according to the methods of multimodal analysis) or in the form of notes from speech interactions (according to the ethnographic method). The researcher who wants to collect data for his/her specific purposes − for example if he/she wants to investigate (im)politeness − has to create settings, a context of interaction and a situation in which a given phenomenon can be elicited. The need for a phonetic analysis makes it necessary to make audio or video recordings of data. These need to be made in a recording studio in order to ensure quality suitable for such an analysis (e.g. one channel per speaker, no background noises). Participants in recording sessions do not behave as naturally as they would in a natural setting (i.e. without microphones or cameras). What is more, spoken language is characterised by phenomena that are exclusively typical for it when compared to written language. They include: anacoluthons, corrections, repairs, hearer signals, speaker signals, particles, discourse markers etc., i.e. phenomena that are treated as communicative “disturbances” in written language but are fundamental in face-to-face-interactions. Considering the above requirements, one can state that creating corpora of spoken language requires a completely different approach than corpora of written language. In the following article, a bilingual (Polish and German) corpus of spoken language is presented. The corpus has been created as part of the MCCA: Multimodal Communication: Culturological Analysis project for the purposes of culturological and suprasegmental analysis and consists of three types of recordings. They are: dyadic conversations, scripted monologues (where the participants were supposed to intonate sentences in order to achieve a certain result), and extracts from TV talk shows. The recordings have further been transcribed using the Folker programme and GAT2 (GesprächsAnalytisches Transkriptionssystem) conventions, annotated (by means of the ELAN programme) and phonetically analysed (using Praat programme).