Annotation Guideline No. 8: Annotation Guidelines for Narrative Levels

Abstract

I first became aware of the SANTA project at the Digital Humanities conference in Montreal in the summer of 2017. I had just been assigned a 90-student secondyear undergraduate Digital Humanities undergraduate English Literature class, set to begin in January 2018, and I was looking for a group annotation project for my students. In previous iterations of the course, I had carried out several annotation projects focused on the narrative phenomenon of free indirect discourse (FID) in texts by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. What made these projects successful, from my perspective, was that FID is a complex phenomenon (by definition, a passage in which it is difficult or impossible to say for certain whether a character or narrator is speaking certain words) which is however relatively easy to represent in machine language (for instance, with the TEI element and a few value-attribute pairs). The challenge in the assignment, in other words, was literary rather than technical: while it was easy to learn the TEI tagging, it was hard to say for certain whether a passage from To the Lighthouse was in direct discourse or FID, or to identify who exactly was speaking. To my mind, this made the assignment a meaningful one for my students, teaching them a technical skill while also bringing them into closer contact with the sometimesirresolvable complexities of literary language.