Not Really a Request -- Just First Reactions
| Project: | Annotation Field |
| Version: | 5.x-1.x-dev |
| Component: | User interface |
| Category: | feature request |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | active |
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Finally did some real experimenting with Annotation Field and Text Annotation. In no particular order....
-- Creating an annotation content type is easy and fairly intuitive. The first screen when adding an annotation field to that content type has some help text toward the bottom that talks about fields, but you don't get the actual list of fields on which you can allow annotation until the second screen, after the initial submit. That's a bit confusing -- looks as though there's an error in the creation process on the first screen -- but it's pretty self-explanatory once you walk through the whole process.
-- Annotating a passage of text in a node works great. In a perfect world, one wouldn't have to hit a select button to lock in the highlighted text -- it'd be nice to just select, type in your annotation, and hit submit -- but that's a nitpick.
-- While my first thought was "I wish you could annotate right in the View tab," there may actually be some UI advantages to having the annotations in a dedicated tab. Users may want to view -- and especially print -- a clean copy. So if the goal is to eventually have everything on one screen, a la Marginalia, some thought should be given to including a "Hide Annotations" button/link/whatever.
-- My big wish list item is already on the to-do list: Displaying multiple annotations -- either on the annotated node itself, or on a single "Annotations" tab.
-- Tried creating a helpful View for Annotations, but couldn't figure out how to use Arguments and/or Filters to produce anything constructive beyond a list of all created Annotations. I'm guessing that at this early stage, hard-core argument handling code is a necessity?
Proposed Use Case
My organization frequently publishes "working papers" on a wide range of policy issues, and we'd like to use Annotation Field to literally present them as working drafts -- encouraging colleagues to add their in-line comments and questions so that the final version of a paper can be revised and improved.
I don't love the UI of Marganalia -- see my separate tab/hide annotations comment above -- but that has almost the exact functionality that we would need. My non-developer's take is that Annotation Field now has most if not all of the key building blocks in place; now it's just matter of putting them together in a way that's productive (and hopefully pretty).
We also do a fair amount of video, and annotations there could be a huge help to our (often-long, CSPAN-style) event recordings. But at the moment, its the text annotation that's our primary need.
I'm happy to pitch in on help text and documentation as this moves forward -- just let me know what I can do to help.
Thanks
TKS
#1
many thanks for the review. some responses/questions:
-- Tried creating a helpful View for Annotations, but couldn't figure out how to use Arguments and/or Filters to produce anything constructive beyond a list of all created Annotations. I'm guessing that at this early stage, hard-core argument handling code is a necessity?
Can you be more clear about what you were trying to do here. I don't understand your question either. Maybe you're trying to filter based on seek point (area in the selection)? That should be possible in the future, but not yet.
-- While my first thought was "I wish you could annotate right in the View tab," there may actually be some UI advantages to having the annotations in a dedicated tab. Users may want to view -- and especially print -- a clean copy. So if the goal is to eventually have everything on one screen, a la Marginalia, some thought should be given to including a "Hide Annotations" button/link/whatever.
Ideally this should all be configurable. I think at some level that will be necessary for my own use cases, simply because different sites will have different emphasis on the annotations. Some will want to make it a special mode/context in a tab, so people can see the undecorated version of a document. For some, the annotations are the main content (like analysis of an external document). On the technical side, I'm leaning towards support of these different displays through the Panels2 module.
In a perfect world, one wouldn't have to hit a select button to lock in the highlighted text -- it'd be nice to just select, type in your annotation, and hit submit
I agree this would be great. There's a practical issue that without a discreet user action, we might be grabbing text that was unintentially highlighted. Also, at least with text-selection, there's always one selection per screen. For video/audio, there can be multiple videos on a page all with different seek points, and the annotator would have to guess which one the user intends to annotate. I think it's feasible though, with the system essentially taking a default based on what's there, and the user can correct it when it guesses wrong.
Again, thanks for the comments. Your use cases and ideas for the UI are very helpful.
#2
So, what kind of help might be needed to develop the text annotation module? What is the planned roadmap for text annotation
Also, wondered if you thought about possibly just adopting http://drupal.org/project/fotonotes as image annotation? In my opinion, that module has a bit better workflow, in that it retains the entire image and overlays the annotations....
#3
A couple of small notes:
Italics do not seem to work as a highlighted selection for annotation.
#4
I went to the demo site and I got really confused.
However, the original Marganalia site (http://www.geof.net/code/annotation) is quite clear and simple. Diigo.com is also an inspiring site. Perhaps you could take a look at its UI and workflow. It would be great to have such inline annotations on drupal. Thanks for your work. Hope you keep getting it better. :)