Annotating Narrative Levels: Review of Guideline No. 6

The framing of Guideline VI within the pedagogical situation of a class on “Digital Methods in Literary Studies” is helpful in pointing out some of the ways in which the theory and practice of annotation can serve students of literature, as well as eventually contributing to computational analysis. Above all, annotation necessitates firm decisions, as the authors describe: ”Rather than let an ambiguous text stay ambiguous, they simply had to decide for one option in order to be able to annotate a passage and had to justify their choice with reference to the whole text or to adapt the guidelines in order to address and document the ambiguity” (3). This remark highlights the challenge in developing annotation guidelines so that they can be used consistently by different communities of users without modifications. The authors note several points of debate within the class that are relevant to the overall shared task and its evaluation: the feasibility of developing annotation guidelines that could be applied to a wide range of literary texts; the involved levels of textual interpretation that some kinds of annotation require; and the effect of prior study or knowledge on an annotator’s ability to discern or interpret narrative levels. As the shared task proceeds, itmay be necessary to specify the applicability of the annotation guidelines to works from particular genres, time periods, or languages.