Notation and Annotation of Structured Data: The Interactive and Annotative Behaviors of Musicians Dissertation Prospectus

Recently, numerous scholars in the field of Information Science have published studies concerned with various user groups ’ annotative behavior, viewing annotations as a kind of by-product of user interaction with a text. Marshall (1997) analyzed the annotation patterns of university student’s textbooks and developed a framework for analysis (1998); Shipman et. Al (2003) worked on the annotations of law students ’ legal-briefs in preparation for mock courts; Wolfe (2000) looked at the effect of annotation on students ’ writing abilities; Cunningham & Knowles (2005) reviewed the annotation behaviors of professionals upon conference proceedings; and Luo et. al (2005) explored the ways in which annotations assisted librarians with the process of cataloging websites. Most of these studies were prepared and carried out with specific goals: the development of useful tools designed to allow innate user interactive and collaborative behaviors, like writing in the margins, or “annotating ” digital documents to be more feasible than currently realized. Although we are only beginning to recognize the full potential of digital annotation, the development of blogs, technorati “tags, ” and wikipedia, are steps in the right direction, allowing people to identify, augment and alter web content almost at will. With tools like wikalong, purple slurple, and Flickr’s “note ” tool, web users can also declare their opinions, state their views, or simply comment on web pages either privately or in public