Authors:
Ricardo Kawase
1
;
Eelco Herder
2
and
Wolfgang Nejdl
1
Affiliations:
1
Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany
;
2
Universität Hannover, Germany
Keyword(s):
Annotation, Trail, Social Media, Social network, Online Collaboration, User Interface, SpreadCrumbs.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Multimedia and User Interfaces
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
Web Interfaces and Applications
Abstract:
Annotations have been shown to be an important activity during reading, especially during “active reading”. Annotations support understanding, interpretation, sensemaking and scannability. As valuable as in paper-based contexts, digital online annotations provide several benefits for annotators and collaborators. To study the impact of these benefits we present in this paper SpreadCrumbs, a straightforward Web annotation tool. SpreadCrumbs offers simple annotation’s interactions and metaphors that support most of the users’ annotations needs in the digital environment by enhancing the web experience with “in-context” annotations and providing a unique form of social navigation support with hypertrails. The results of our studies with the tool show the importance of annotations, the empirical outperformance of “in-context” annotations over other methods, and the outcome benefits of supporting social navigation.