Abstract
I first became aware of the SANTA project at the Digital Humanities conferencein Montreal in the summer of 2017. I had just been assigned a 90-student secondyearundergraduate Digital Humanities undergraduate English Literature class,set to begin in January 2018, and I was looking for a group annotation project formy students. In previous iterations of the course, I had carried out several annotationprojects focused on the narrative phenomenon of free indirect discourse(FID) in texts by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. What made these projectssuccessful, 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 acharacter or narrator is speaking certain words) which is however relatively easyto represent in machine language (for instance, with the TEI element anda 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 directdiscourse or FID, or to identify who exactly was speaking. To my mind,this made the assignment a meaningful one for my students, teaching them atechnical skill while also bringing them into closer contact with the sometimesirresolvablecomplexities of literary language.
How to Cite:
Hammond, A., (2020) “Annotation Guideline No. 8: Annotation Guidelines for Narrative Levels”, Journal of Cultural Analytics 4(3). https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.11773 (external link, opens in new tab).