Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
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Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
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Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#2The example it uses of a good annotation,
When Nas speaks about “sleep [being] the cousin of death”, Genius tells me the line is ‘perhaps inspired by the Talmud (which tells us that sleep is 1/60th of death) or the Iliad (where Hypnos and Thanatos – i.e. “sleep” and “death” – are described as brothers)’.
is more like an example of a bad annotation. Really, we're supposed to believe that 19 year old Nas was referencing the Talmud? This is basically the stereotype of Rap Genius, that it contains a bunch of contrived ridiculous explanations for the meaning of lyrics that are very unlikely to be accurate.
Another problem on Rap Genius is that sometimes the annotations are more jokes than explanations. Judging by the downvotes people get here for posting Reddit-like jokes, I think we are all aware of the near-universal problem of jokes being upvoted over "real" content.
And one more comment...
Annotations work particularly well in two contexts; first, when explaining the meaning of a single word
I don't know if that is true. It depends on what assumptions you make about the reader. Obviously it would be bad to annotate every single word with its definition, that would be overkill. But where do you draw the line? There's no universal answer. For example, I'm sure that many people have heard the word "ratchet" in rap songs without knowing what it means, but if you look up songs with that word on Rap Genius, the annotation is most likely not a definition. Probably either no annotation or a joke, since contributors to Rap Genius all already know what "ratchet" means.
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#3I agree somewhat, but I think the article underlines a problem with the Genius UI as it is now, rather than the concept.
The current Genius UI of 'annotation' restricts the concept to highlighting words and phrases. This is limiting. But annotation thats both richer and looser would be more flexible: Allowing people to reference chapters or sections more generally, and potentially multiple sections simultaneously and cross reference annotations themselves. I could see utility in something that allowed the creation of CliffNotes style context alongside the real content. And that also falls under the umbrella of 'annotation' in my mind. There's also potential in the idea of real-time annotation, rather than the snapshot, more curated content they seem to have now.
Doing any of this in a way that isn't overly complex or cumbersome will be tricky, and I've no idea if it's a direction that the creators want (or can) develop it in.
Genius were a lyrics site with an interesting javascript UI and great SEO. They sold that JS UI as part of a bigger picture. But for the reasons the article mentions that JS UI isn't going to take them there. Hopefully they can use that 15 million to build something that will.
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#4Related: videos & slides from April 2014 W3C annotation workshop, http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#5Since the article takes a while to get to the point teased by the headline, I'll spoil it here: The author believes that most non-rap works spread their references and allusions across a wide body of words, which allegedly makes them too hard to annotate.
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#6The example it uses of a good annotation, When Nas speaks about “sleep [being] the cousin of death”, Genius tells me the line is ‘perhaps inspired by the Talmud (which tells us that sleep is 1/60th of death) or the Iliad (where Hypnos and Thanatos – i.e. “sleep” and “death” – are described as brothers)’. is more like an example of a bad annotation. Really, we're supposed to believe that 19 year old Nas was referencin…
Why couldn't 19 year old Nas reference the Talmud?
The goal of any critical reading isn't necessarily to reverse engineer the author's intended meaning, it's to examine the work in context:
------------------
http://johngreenbooks.com/questions-about-the-fault-in-our-s...
Q. Isn’t authorial intent important in terms of communication between reader and writer?
A. But it ISN’T a conversation between you and me if all you’re doing is attempting to understand what I’m saying. That’s just you LISTENING to me, which is kind of boring. Like, don’t get me wrong, that act of listening to art/media can be pleasantly distracting and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. That’s essentially what watching an episode of NCIS is, I’d argue: The show knows who killed the person and you don’t and then at the end they tell you.
But I think what happens when you read a book—ideally, anyway—is much more complicated and beautiful and collaborative. My intent as an author matters some, but you as the reader get some agency, too. You get to discover meaning within the story, and sometimes the meaning you discover will be meaning I hoped you would discover, and sometimes it will be meaning I could never have imagined you discovering. But together, we get to build something that matters to you (hopefully), and that brings you pleasure and consolation and a feeling of unaloneness that you can never get from merely listening.
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#7It's a for-profit site that runs off unpaid/donated microlabor. It's gonna take some serious gamification to keep that model palatable to contributors if/when the cash start rolling in (or they get a big exit, etc).
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#8It would be great is the article could be annotated. http://wordpress.org/plugins/livefyre-sidenotes/
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#9The example it uses of a good annotation, When Nas speaks about “sleep [being] the cousin of death”, Genius tells me the line is ‘perhaps inspired by the Talmud (which tells us that sleep is 1/60th of death) or the Iliad (where Hypnos and Thanatos – i.e. “sleep” and “death” – are described as brothers)’. is more like an example of a bad annotation. Really, we're supposed to believe that 19 year old Nas was referencin…
Why couldn't 19 year old Nas reference the Talmud? The goal of any critical reading isn't necessarily to reverse engineer the author's intended meaning, it's to examine the work in context: ------------------ http://johngreenbooks.com/questions-about-the-fault-in-our-s... Q. Isn’t authorial intent important in terms of communication between reader and writer? A. But it ISN’T a conversation between you and me if all y…
Authorial intent isn't privileged in a critical reading of a text, except when you use phrases like "perhaps inspired by the Talmud", at which point you're making comments about authorial intent.
I'm going to have to go with the GP on this (though the article itself isn't very good). A very large percentage of Rap Genius annotations are just useless, and that's just out of the ones that are trying to be helpful instead of making a joke or providing information that's plain wrong.
Even forgiving for direct appeal to what the lyricist supposedly meant, annotations seem to jump to the very first connection the annotator thought of, and the number of annotations for the same line (and the number of votes weighing the alternative annotations) is so low that a signal isn't rising out of the noise.
Maybe that's just for the entries I end up looking at on there, but they aren't exactly obscure songs.
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#10It's a for-profit site that runs off unpaid/donated microlabor. It's gonna take some serious gamification to keep that model palatable to contributors if/when the cash start rolling in (or they get a big exit, etc).
What on Earth are you talking about? iFixit, Wikia, and many others make money based on people generating high-quality content for free.
This is hardly some daring new business model.