Improving Annotations in Digital Documents

Abstract

Annotation plays a major role in a user’s reading of a document: from elementary school students making notes on text books to professors marking up their latest research papers. A common place for annotations to appear is in the margin of a document. Surprisingly, there is little systematic knowledge of how, why and when annotations are written in margins or over the main text. This paper investigates how margin size impacts the ease with which documents can be annotated, and user annotation behavior. The research comprises of a two part investigation: first, a paper study that examines margins and their use in physical documents; secondly, we evaluate document reader software that supports an extended margin for annotation in digital documents.