Social Annotation at Scale Justin Hodgson | Indiana University

What is Social Annotation?

With the pandemic shifting our online model to be the model for all First Year Composition (standard), our Social Annotation tweak ended up operating at scale.

Semester Snapshot

At Scale

What we've learned?

• Students have reacted positively to SA inclusion.
• Instructors, initially reluctant, have embraced it and expanded its uses: e.g., annotating the syllabus, assignment handouts, rubrics, etc.
• Instructors have indicated an improved student engagement with course readings.
• We have expanded it to all standard and online first-year composition, our special topics first-year composition offerings, as well as all our 200-level Intro to Genre courses (Intro to Prose, Intro to Poetry, Intro to Fiction, Intro to Drama).

Where we are now in our data...the ABCs

The top 3 most read/annotated texts across all three semesters were by Gloria Anzaldúa, John Berger, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

LIWC | Average LIWC Scores per Annotation per Reading

At its core, LIWC-22 consists of software and a “dictionary” — that is, a map that connects important psychosocial constructs and theories with words, phrases, and other linguistic constructions. Groups of words that tap a particular domain (e.g., negative emotion words) are variously grouped into categories and LIWC scores textual elements according to the percentage of words that fit its categories. We focused on the top 4 LIWC categories (Analytic, Clout, Authentic, and Tone) and two additional categories (Cognition and Social Processes)