Textarium: Entangling Annotation, Abstraction and Argument
This addresses the problem of fragmented scholarly reading and writing practices for researchers and digital humanists, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing visualization and interface concepts.
The paper tackles the challenge of integrating annotation, abstraction, and argumentation in text interpretation by developing Textarium, a web-based environment that combines human analysis with computational processing to bridge close and distant reading, resulting in a tool that makes interpretive processes transparent and shareable within digital narratives.
We present a web-based environment that connects annotation, abstraction, and argumentation during the interpretation of text. As a visual interface for scholarly reading and writing, Textarium combines human analysis with lightweight computational processing to bridge close and distant reading practices. Readers can highlight text, group keywords into concepts, and embed these observations as anchors in essays. The interface renders these interpretive actions as parameterized visualization states. Through a speculative design process of co-creative and iterative prototyping, we developed a reading-writing approach that makes interpretive processes transparent and shareable within digital narratives.