Abstract
With the rapid development of digital humanities research and the digitization of ancient Chinese books, annotation has become a critical pre-processing activity to extract information for quantitative analysis and to prepare training corpus for natural language processing models. Since manual annotation is a repetitive and time-consuming task that occupies the majority of humanities scholars’ time, humanities scholars are looking for tools to facilitate annotation. However, existing tools cannot fulfill the annotation needs of humanities scholars. Few studies have investigated current annotation practices and requirements of humanities scholars, not to mention Chinese annotators. This paper explores Chinese humanities scholars’ annotation practice, needs, and expectations of annotation tools based on interviews with 12 participants from different humanities disciplines. The interview transcripts are coded in three steps: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. Six main categories are identified. We described the analysis results of three categories: annotation practice, feature requirements, and user experience. We further discussed the design implications and requirements of the research environment and the limitations of the work and future work.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Porter-O’Donnell, C.: Beyond the yellow highlighter: teaching annotation skills to improve reading comprehension. English J. 93, 82–89 (2004). https://doi.org/10.2307/4128941
Unsworth, J.: Scholarly primitives: what methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this. In: Symposium on Humanities Computing: Formal Methods, Experimental Practice. King's College, London (2000)
Yang, J., Zhang, Y., Li, L., Li, X.: YEDDA: a lightweight collaborative text span annotation tool. arXiv:1711.03759 [cs] (2018)
Yimam, S.M., Gurevych, I., Eckart de Castilho, R., Biemann, C.: WebAnno: a flexible, web-based and visually supported system for distributed annotations. In: Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations. pp. 1–6. Association for Computational Linguistics, Sofia, Bulgaria (2013)
Stenetorp, P., Pyysalo, S., Topić, G., Ohta, T., Ananiadou, S., Tsujii, J.: BRAT: a web-based tool for NLP-assisted text annotation. In: Proceedings of the Demonstrations at the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 102–107. Association for Computational Linguistics, Avignon, France (2012)
Ho, Brent, H.I., De Weerdt, H.: MARKUS - text analysis and reading platform. http://dh.chinese-empires.eu/beta/. Accessed 15 Aug 2022
Chen, S.-P., Yeh, C., Che, Q., Wang, S.: LoGaRT: local gazetteers research tools (software). https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/logart-local-gazetteers-research-tools. Accessed 15 Aug 2022
Neves, M., Seva, J.: Annotationsaurus: a searchable directory of annotation tools. arXiv:2010.06251 [cs] (2020)
Van Gompel, M., Başar, E., Neumann, A., Van Der Klis, M.: Proycon/flat: v0.11. https://zenodo.org/record/6567192 (2022). https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.6567192
Gius, E.,et al.: CATMA. https://zenodo.org/record/1470118 (2022). https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.1470118
Bin, L., Lu, W., Xiaohe, C., Dongbo, W.: Digital humanity based ancient text annotation and visualization – a case study on Zuozhuan knowledgebase. J. Acad. Lib. 38, 70–80 (2020)
Harvard University, Academia Sinica, Peking University: China Biographical Database Project (CBDB). https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/home. Accessed 25 Aug 2022
Toms, E.G., O’Brien, H.L.: Understanding the information and communication technology needs of the e-humanist. J. Documentation. 64, 102–130 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410810844178
Gibbs, F., Owens, T.: Building Better Digital Humanities Tools: Toward broader audiences and user-centered designs. DHQ. 006 (2012)
Gao, D., He, L., Liu, J., Li, Z.: Construction over operation? a study of the usage of digital humanities databases in China. Aslib J. Inf. Manag. 74, 1–18 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-03-2021-0087
Chen, C.-M., Chang, C., Chen, Y.-T.: A character social network relationship map tool to facilitate digital humanities research. Library Hi Tech. ahead-of-print (2021). https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-08-2020-0194
Cuijuan, X., Lihua, W., Wei, L.: Shanghai memory as a digital humanities platform to rebuild the history of the city. Dig. Sch. Humanit.. 36, 841–857 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab023
Given, L.M., Willson, R.: Information technology and the humanities scholar: documenting digital research practices. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 69, 807–819 (2018)
Pickard, A.J.: Research Methods in Information. Facet Publishing, London (2013)
Corbin, J., Strauss, A.: Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. SAGE Publications (2014)
Matthew, B., Miles, A., Huberman, M., Saldana, J.: Qualitative Data Analysis: A Methods Sourcebook. SAGE Publications, Inc. (2014)
Hahn, U., et al.: An annotation type system for a data-driven NLP pipeline. In: Proceedings of the Linguistic Annotation Workshop. pp. 33–40. Association for Computational Linguistics, Prague, Czech Republic (2007)
Moretti, F.: Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. Verso (2005)
Stone, S.: Humanities scholars: information needs and uses. J. Documentation 38, 292–313 (1982)
Zhou, Q.: Annotation scheme for Chinese treebank (in Chinese). J. Chin. Inf. Process., 1–8 (2004)
Academia Sinica: Academia Sincia Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese. http://asbc.iis.sinica.edu.tw/. Accessed 29 Aug 2022
Acknowledgment
The authors thank the reviewers for their valuable feedback. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72010107003).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Li, W., Ho, TY., Wang, J. (2023). Towards a Useful Chinese Annotation Tool: An Examination of Annotators’ Practice and Needs. In: Sserwanga, I., et al. Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity. iConference 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13972. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_27
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_27
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-28031-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-28032-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)