Improving annotations in digital documents
Jennifer S. Pearson, George Robert Buchanan, Harold Thimbleby · 2009
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 pa-per 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 ex-tended margin for annotation in digital documents.