Case Study

The case study is based on student annotations from a class on Digital Methods in Literary Studies taught in the English Studies / English Literatures and Cultures programme at Tübingen University. The annotation task consisted in tagging the ambiguous modality of must in Jane Austen’s novel Emma (1816). The article, in a first step, presents how the criteria for annotation task were developed on the basis of a close reading of the novel; these evolved into annotation guidelines which were then translated into tag sets for two annotation tools: CATMA and CorefAnnotator. The overall results of the annotation process are discussed, with a particular focus on the difficulties that emerged as well as (patterns of) mistakes and misconceptions across the groups and individual annotators. This approach will yield insights into challenges when annotating with a group in a teaching context as well as foreground conceptual difficulties when it comes to annotating complex phenomena in literary texts

Annotation · Computational and Text Analysis Methods · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Second Language Acquisition and Learning