Annotated Web Edition Directory

ADAonline is Brian Boyd’s ongoing project of a completely annotated edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Ada.

The explanatory annotations, according to the website’s mission statement, “attempt especially to explain matters of immediate information both outside the novel (geography, biology, history, literature, lexicology, biography, Nabokovology) and inside (recurring phrases, restated subjects, interlocking details). To serve undergraduates and those who are not native speakers of English, the notes are over- rather than under-explicit, but attempt to resist the over-ingenious. They occasionally touch on larger questions of interpretation, although in general such matters are mostly confined to the afternotes.”

The AdaOnline project began in 1993, in print form, and until 2015 was still being added to, a section at a time, in print, in the journal The Nabokovian, twice a year; now it goes up on the online successor the journal, nabokovian.org, three times a year, and there it is firewalled for eight months. 69 sections in toto, 41 already open, 2 more firewalled, 26 to come.

This edition offers a facsimile, a diplomatic transcription and a semi-diplomatic transcription of a hand-written glossary added to folio 55v of Aldhelm’s 56 leave prose De uirginitate.

This 1997 online edition of Dickens’s A Christmal Carol is based on a version Dickens had condensed for public readings.
The annotations at the bottom of the page are linked to the terms and expressions in the text they explain.

From their website:

Annotation Studio is a suite of tools for collaborative web-based annotation, currently under development by MIT’s HyperStudio. Annotation Studio actively engages students in interpreting primary sources such as literary texts and other humanities documents. Currently supporting the multimedia annotation of texts, Annotation Studio will ultimately allow students to annotate video, image, and audio sources.

Thus, this is no digital annotated edition per se, but a platform for the production of annotated texts. The texts can be made available to the public, or shared in separate digital classrooms for smaller groups to edit and annotate. The ones publicly available therefore vary widely in the quality of content (depending on the annotating community that worked with the texts), but the web application itself is a very good tool to create annotated editions in the classroom and maybe even publish a fully digitally annotated edition.

This online edition of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener provides interpretative notes on the text that can be accessed by clicking on the annotated item. The annotations are seperated into categories such as “commentary”, “economics”, “queer”, “comedy”, “philosophy”, etc.

The reader has the abilty to enable or disable certain categories in order to only get the kind of information that he/she is looking for.

This edition is also noteworthy for its distribution method. It is one of the few attempts of an established news magazine/blog (slate.com) to include a literary piece together with explanatory glosses.

This website offers a whole variety of annotated texts by English authors such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and Lewis Carroll.
The project differentiates between three types of annotations. Annotations marked with an uppercase “w” are definitions of words or terms, “h”-annotations deal with historical background, and “d”-annotations are discussions/interpretations of certain elements of a text.

Many annotations belong to a “category”, a kind of semantic field (like “Writing & Reading”, “Daily Life”, “Gender”) which is supposed to help the reader streamline his/her search through the annotations.

In the site’s own words:

Digital Renaissance Editions publishes electronic scholarly editions of early English drama and texts of related interest, from late medieval moralities and Tudor interludes, occasional entertainments and civic pageants, academic and closet drama, and the plays of the commercial London theaters, through to the drama of the Civil War and Interregnum. […], editions include photo-facsimiles and diplomatic transcriptions of early textual witnesses alongside a modern-spelling text with full critical apparatus and generous introductory and supplementary materials.

The texts presented are each prepared by a single editor and include annotations that cover a wide range of information (as, for example, vocabulary explanation, intertexts or interpretative annotation). The notes are shown as pop-up boxes beside the play text.

 As of December 2019, the pop-up annotations in the texts are not visible.

The digital domain not only offers new space for large projects of collaborative annotation and platform projects. It also easily allows and yet enhances the possibilities for smaller edition projects to publish less well-known plays, fully annotated and easily distributed. One such project is Peter Lukacs’ site dedicated to producing “easy-to-read, fully annotated Elizabethan plays” of playwrights lesser known than Shakespeare. His collection comprises plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, George Chapman, John Ford, John Lyly, Robert Greene and Philip Massinger, as well as the complete plays of Christopher Marlowe and George Peele.  Lukacs’ editions consequently give half of the page space to the annotation, set as parallel notes aligned with their lemmas in the play text. They offer a wide range of information between lexical and linguistic notes, context and earlier literary criticism.  Lukacs’ annotated editions are on par with the more traditional offerings of well-known publishers and are ample proof that independent scholarship need not stand back behind institutional academic research.

This website offers an intricately annotated version of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. 

The editor describes the purpose of the website as follows:

“This site is a learning resource allowing exploration of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. Part of the site uses a framed presentation of the poem with hyperlinked notes, definitions, translations, cross references, texts of works alluded to, commentary, and questions to the reader. Another part of the site is unframed and describes how to use the site, has pages of links to other sites, contains a bibliography, holds essays and supplementary material, gives theme paper help and so on.”

The supplementary section of the website explains how to use the website.

Almost an oddity in annotatory practice, FWEET accumulated over 84000 notes on Finnegan’s Wake. These are not presented as glosses (the site does not contain the novel’s text at all), but as single notes behind a search engine. The website is not very user-friendly, and the search interface is complicated, but the notes are rich and deep. A special focus seems to be on intertextual references with the search mask offering separate fields for different intertexts (the Bible, Shakespeare, Newspapers, etc.) as well as motifs and topical clusters.

The world’s largest platform for annotation, Genius.com, is a service that enables users to comment on texts line by line. It stresses the social media component of shared notes by presenting the annotations as ongoing comments parallel to the text, but only shows the top-voted annotation. While many of the annotations cannot hold up to closer scrutiny, the page profits from its exceptionally large userbase and mostly relies on community participation and reviewing, as well as on superusers (called “editors”) and staff members who can regulate the worst cases.

Similar to hypothes.is, NewsGenius is a part of genius.com that aims to socially annotate web pages.

In short: while much of the content delivered by genius.com is discursive and not explanatory, the platform itself is an interesting enterprise to involve a public in annotatory practices.

This online edition of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd offers textual notes as well explanatory notes.
Different categories are separated by a colour code (red = historical, biblical, and mythical allusions; blue = glossary; green = explanation of nautical terms).
Furthermore, some chapters of the edition are enriched with editorial comments as well as interpretative comments, which can be accessed through icons located at the top of the page.

Hypothes.is is a tool that lets users annotate any web content they wish by placing an “annotation layer” over the browser window. Social markup is written on this layer via a browser plugin. It currently is the annotation tool of choice for a coalition of publishers and archive providers (e.g. Oxford University Press, HathiTrust, JStor, Wiley or CrossRef).

The beta version of this social annotation edition went offline in May 2016 for its update to the final full release. The notes collected in the beta phase are still available as text file on Github: https://github.com/amandavisconti/infinite-ulysses-public. The more developed code prepared for Dr. Visconti’s dissertation amounts to a starter package for building social digital editions with annotation functions on a Drupal platform. This code resides at https://github.com/amandavisconti/infinite-ulysses-dissertation.

The Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) provide the full text of all of Shakespeare’s plays in modern and old spelling with supplementary materials for each of them. Six plays (As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Henry V, Twelfth Night, Henry IV Part I and The Winter’s Tale) are presented with copious explanatory annotations, each play’s edition prepared by a single editor. The note’s contents cover a wide range of knowledge, such as vocabulary clarification, staging practices, intertextual references and, to a smaller degree, interpretive readings of Shakespeare’s text.

This online edition of Jane Austen’s manuscripts contains facsimiles along with diplomatic transcriptions of her working drafts, fair copies and publications for private circulation. It covers the time span between her earliest writings at the age of 11 or 12 (1787) and the year of her death (1817).
Footnotes are used to reconstruct parts of the manuscripts that have been erased or overwritten.

According to its introduction, Lord Byron and his Times is a “digital archive of books, pamphlets, and periodical essays illustrating the causes and controversies that preoccupied Byron and his contemporaries. The documents, large and small, ephemeral and monumental, underscore the social dimensions of publishing in the romantic era.”

Important persons that appear in the text are put in historical context by pop-up annotations; footnotes provide background information about the documents and include hyperlinks to related text passages in the archive.

The Mark Twain Project attempts to create a critical online edition of everything Mark Twain has ever written.
Annotations are indicated in the text by blue brackets (explanatory notes giving historical background) and yellow brackets (editorial notes on differences to the original and other editions).
A click on a bracket opens the individual annotation.

This website offers an annotated version of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.

The annotations, according to the editor Matthew Waller, aim to analyze the artistic style of Conrad’s novel as well as its philosophy and meaning.

The interpretative annotations can be opened in the left margin by clicking on the highlighted parts of the text.

The website also includes two essays on Nostromo, which, according to the editor, “are meant to complement the annotated text.”

A social annotation Wiki project dedicated to creating exaplanatory page-by-page annotations for Thomas Pynchon’s novels. The texts themselves are (for copyright reasons) not included, but the notes are offered as lists “per page.” The information given covers many kinds knowledge, but often aims at clarifying intertextual and contextual references. While not all of the information is scholarly viable (especially when the interpretive agenda becomes too detached from Pynchon’s text), many of the notes presented are helpful and well-grounded.

The site also offers essay entries and further paratextual information on the novels and their author.

An online edition of Richard Brome’s plays providing mainly explanatory annotations for language and context. The edition presents the octavo text as well as a modernized text and comes with additional introductory texts, essays, a glossary, stage histories and (excerpts from) video recordings of the plays’ performances. Prepared by a team of international researchers experienced in editing period texts and texts for performance, the annotations are of a high scholarly standard. They are presented in three categories (signified by their according symbols attached to the annotated text): commentaries, glosses, notes and textual notes.

The website offers an annotated edition of the Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste.

It includes a facsimile as well as a semi-diplomatic transcription.

Names, places, and works of art mentioned in the text can be clicked at to get information about the item as well as a complete list of other occurrences in the text.

Editorial notes can be opened in the right margin by clicking on the corresponding hyperlinks in the text.

Reference annotations can be opened by clicking on the speech bubbles in the transcribed text.

Shakespeare Navigators presents an open access selection of Shakeshake’s plays annotated by Prof. Philip Weller. The site offers the texts in a clean layout of two columns with the right half of the page dedicated to the notes arranged parallel to their lemmas (a layout similar to Elizabethandrama.org). The majority of the annotations addresses lexical difficulties or offers paraphrases. The shorter notes are displayed in full within the column while more extensive readings are linked to separate pages. Weller mostly restricts the notes to matters of understanding the language and only includes contextual information where it is directly necessary for making sense of the literary text. He rarely offers more general information, intertexts or interpretive approaches to the plays’ larger themes, thus creating clean-cut editions strongly focused on the literary text.

The online edition of The Aberdeen Bestiary contains a facsimile of the Latin text as well as a semi-diplomatic transcription and translation next to the facsimile of each folio page. The annotations are explanatory and mostly describe the illustrations.

This project aims to create an online edition of Franz Rosenzweigs Der Stern der Erlösung (engl. The Star of Redemption), as well as encourage an academic discussion by means of a social annotation concept, in which annotations can be commented on, enriched, or qualified by voluntary annotators

The focus of the annotations is supposed to be on intertextual references and allusions throughout the text.

The edition offers explanatory notes on Jonathan Swift’s The Battel of the Books. The annotations are mainly concerned with clarifying the historical and mythological allusions made by Swift.

From the edition’s website:

The ELECTRONIC EDITION of the Cambridge Edition, which will appear in staged instalments, includes the entire contents of the Print Edition, together with its introductions, collations, and commentaries, in fully searchable format. To this it adds a series of satellite archives and databases which supplement and extend the material in the Print Edition. These will be revised and updated to take in future developments in knowledge about Jonson.

This online edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle presents a standard text version of more than 10,000 letters. Explanatory footnotes are given for each letter, clarifying references and providing hyperlinks to other letters that are being referred to.

Robert Whalen and Christopher Hodgkins’ edition of George Herbert’s collection of poems The Temple presents the reader with facsimile editions of three separate witnesses (the 1633 first edition and two earlier scripts).  The edition is to be browsed poem by poem, either in a “discrete witness” view that places the full text of a single witness next to the facsimile image viewer or as parallel text windows to which the separate texts can be comfortably assigned. No critically edited version is offered but the edition provides solely the unchanged texts, even forgoing modernized spelling. Yet it is not an exclusively documentary edition, insofar as it provides a critical apparatus that relates the different manuscript versions to each other where it is relevant. It also includes textual pop-up notes for (now) archaic orthography, thus effectively keeping the manuscript text pristine, yet updated for easier readability.

Apart from these orthographic pop-up notes, each poem’s explanatory note set consists of a head note attached to the title and a series of notes scoped to single, full lines with the respective markers places to the right of the each line. Herein lies the edition’s single most puzzling display decision in an otherwise excellent design: by eschewing more precise inline note markers, the reader does not easily know which part of the line is annotated without opening the note window and reading the note. It adds to the imprecision that the line-level annotation covers single words (for example, lexical notes) as well as notes addressing passages of multiple lines. Furthermore, most notes only address a single issue where the line as a whole might need several, separate notes to address different questions.

The explanatory notes themselves can either be displayed as inline notes presented in a separate frame to the right of the text(s),  popup notes or be completely hidden from the text. They comprise mainly intertextual (often biblical, as is to expect for Herbert’s writings) and historical annotations , but also a relatively large amount of interpretive notes. Whalen and Hodgkins strongly rely on Helen Wilcox’s edition of The Temple for their annotations and only cautiously include other recent debates on Herbert’s texts. Their reasoning is that of “a sort of via media, to bring the textual and contextual facts into contact with a brief summary of scholarly debate, drawing conclusions where warranted but avoiding polemic.” This gentle authoritative approach results in well-balanced scholarly information on a consistently high level. Thus, the edition can fully be recommended to scholars or advanced students, even it might not fully work as a gentle introduction to Herbert’s complex poetry for undergraduates.

The Milton Reading Room is a collaborative annotation project of Thomas Luxon and his students that has been active since 1997. The site contains all of Milton’s poetry in English, Italian, Latin, and Greek, and selections of his prose. All of the plain texts presented are fully annotated. The notes are exclusively explanatory. Additional materials include introductions to each text as well as a research bibliography and a link list.

This website set out to offer annotated editions of Thomas Middleton’s plays, but was abandoned before the project was finished. Still, about two-thirds of the plays (including collaborations and some text of questionable attribution) are annotated by the website’s editor, Chris Cleary (University of Virginia).

The annotations are presented as footnotes, hyperlinked to the corresponding items in the text.

Robert Hollander’s online publication of Dante’s works features a fully annotated and enriched edition of the Divine Comedy. Hollander himself provides one set of annotations that is paralleled by Paget Toynbee’s notes on Dante and the collected commentaries of the Dartmouth Dante Project (in itself 70 sets of notes written between 1322 and today; the project is ongoing). All information is displayed next to the Italian original text and an English translation, together with an audio recording of an Italian reading and additional image material.

The site also offers additional lectures on Dante, as well as additional multimedia resources.

This interactive edition of five of Thoreau’s texts is part of the Digital Thoreau project, which is directed by Paul Schacht and backed by the SUNY and the Thoreau Society. Its layout and mechanics are based on CommentPress and Commons in a Box.

Users can join groups or create new ones, e.g. for a university seminar or a conference. They can decide whether the annotations created in these groups are visible to everyone or just to group members. Contributors are also marked according to their level of expertise, e.g. some users are part of a ‘group of experts’.

The notes to Walden include a note set by the renowned Thoreau scholar Walter Harding.

This website offers annotated versions of some of Henry David Thoreau’s writings (e.g. his novel Walden).

The explanatory notes at the bottom of each chapter are hyperlinked to the text and deal mainly with questions of reference (historical, intertextual, geographical).

The Vergil Project presents a digital edition of the Aeneid that includes three commentaries set as annotation displayed beside the literary text. The commentaries reproduce two older editions (Conington/Nettleship and Maurus Servius Honratus) and add a contemporary set of notes by Prof. Joseph Farrell. While the main site’s main display shows the Latin original, two translations  (Dryden and Williams) are available in the annotation frame. An additional word-by-word translation is directly available via mouse hover. The site also provides notes to Homeric intertexts (after Knauer) and a concordance function.

This edition provides a collection of writings and articles by Jonathan Edwards. Some of the texts are available as edited published works, others in the form of diplomatic transcripts.
Annotations are presented as unlinked footnotes.

The Thomas Gray Archive is dedicated to “transcribe and provide digital images of all Gray materials, including published works, manuscripts, letters, notebooks, and marginalia.” Gray’s poems are presented with a formal analysis (concerned with meter, rhyme and genre) and an annotated display of the poem itself. The annotations are divided into explanatory and textual notes.

Most of the website’s numerous annotations are quoted from older editions of Gray’s works, but the ultimate goal is to involve a larger audience of scholars in the annotation process. To this end, the site provides social annotation functions on a line-by-line basis. The notes are editorially screened before publication.

The website offers an online version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, in the edition of 1909, published by Charles E. Merrill Co.
The annotations, written by the editor of the 1909 edition, Franklin T. Baker, are presented as footnotes and can be accessed directly by means of hyperlinks in the plain text.

About the aim of the annotations Baker writes in the preface:
“The present editor has therefore sought only to furnish such notes as will save the reader from the inconvenience of going to the dictionary, and such comments as will enlighten him regarding the high place the book has won with readers of cultivated tastes.”

This online edition offers a mark-up of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The annotations are adapted from Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated.

A colour code helps the reader identify different levels of narrative. The annotations avoid literary interpretation and instead deal mostly with context (intra- and intertextual, historical, linguistic).

This edition of William Godwin’s diary contains his diary entries from 1788 until 1836 both as facsimiles and transcriptions. Explanatory notes clarify the meaning of abbreviations, names, places, events, literary works both read and written by Godwin and other important matters mentioned in the diary.