Towards a richer sense of Digital Annotation: Moving beyond a 'media' orientation of the annotation of digital objects

Digital technology often gives us the chance to re-conceive common scholarly practices with the humanities, and one of these is the practice of annotation. Whereas many in the digital humanities look at annotation through the lens of social media, in this paper we consider annotation’s already established function in scholarship: to support the development of an interpretation of a body of material. It begins by applying a “software application” perspective to annotation and it notes that personal annotation sits at the nexus between the publishing application of the material being annotated, and an interpretation development application that aims to support the reader’s thinking.