In the meantime, you can read about eMargin on the JISC e-Learning Blog.

Previously the link from the group to the text determined the access permissions on that text for all of its members. Now, the access level that a user has in a group will become the access level that a user is assigned in the connected texts (with the possibility to set a maximum level). We have updated the instructions for setting up groups and texts to reflect this.

On November 23, we were invited to present eMargin at a workshop on Corpora at the University of Nottingham. This workshop was part of the AHRC-funded Hidden Collections series, designed to introduce doctoral researchers to methods and approaches in the broad field of archives, collections and datasets.

A few weeks later, on December 6, we presented eMargin at Lancaster University in the UCREL Corpus Research Seminar series. Researchers at Lancaster have been using eMargin in their ESRC-funded Metaphor in End of Life Care (MELC) project. The XML-export option in our tool has proved particularly useful in this project and we’re excited to be working with Lancaster in developing eMargin for their particular task.

You can find previous eMargin presentations on Slideshare.

In the Admin section of each Text you’ll now find an Export Text option. You can choose which annotation features you would like to export (the text, comments, tags, permalinks or everything). The XML will then be generated. The format is a small twist on TEI, in the namespace http://emargin.bcu.ac.uk/tei.

The above section can be found in the sidebar when viewing a text. Click the ‘Switch’ button to open up a list of your groups to choose from, or choose ‘Any Group’. The displayed highlights will then be limited to that group. Also, when filtering the annotations by colour, tag or other search options, only those from within the group will be displayed.

This group setting is also set when a user accesses a group page. This is useful when you have separate groups of students, who will see only their own group’s annotations when they subsequently access a text.

We’ve also made some improvements to highlighting on touch-screen devices. Users may drag over the text with their finger tip to highlight words and phrases, just as they would with a mouse. Similarly you can drag open annotations around using their title bars. To scroll the page just touch in the white space elsewhere. Many touch-screen devices will be recognised automatically, but you can also change between selection methods using the Preferences button in the sidebar:

 Firstly, we’ve added a ‘Show only my annotations’ button so you can quickly hide everything other than the annotations or comments that you have written.

 Secondly, in the texts and on pages where your texts are listed, you’ll see a little notification circle telling you if there have been any updates to the text since you last viewed it.

We’re always taking suggestions for new features and if you’d like to add yours then either use our feedback form or comment on this post.

The second event was an HEA workshop hosted by the University of Leicester on July 5. This workshop reported on the findings of the #tagginganna project carried out by the Leicester team, which examined the social annotation of texts online to support seminar discussions at university.

We had already worked with Leicester on a pilot project, testing an early version of eMargin in English seminars there. Feedback from Leicester students was of great benefit to us in designing the full version of eMargin and in securing JISC funding, so we were very pleased to be invited back to talk about the latest developments in our project and to hear more about their work. Our presentation from the workshop is available on SlideShare. You can also read more about the event on the Leicester Peer – 2.0 – Peer Learning Enhancement blog.

Both events were invaluable in helping us to consider different perspectives on e-learning in general and on social annotation in particular, and on the features which may be useful in other disciplines. Expect further developments to eMargin in the coming months!

We we’re very encouraged by the reception of eMargin at both events and will keep developing the tool for use by linguistic researchers (well, that’s what we are after all) as well students and teachers in many other text-based disciplines.

You may have noticed that the interface to eMargin has changed recently. We thought it about time we replaced the functional style of the initial version with something cleaner and generally prettier. We believe these changes will have a positive effect on the usability of eMargin too. Navigation should be simpler and annotations should be easier to read. Of course, we welcome your thoughts on our changes so please let us know what you think.

The recent changes are not solely cosmetic though, with additions to the back-end designed to enable some features which we’ll be launching soon. These include integration with VLEs, more detailed histories, named layers of annotation and other text analysis tools. Watch this space…