[deleted]
Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
11–20 of 20 posts
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#12Genius is in the concordance business. They need to be in the footnote business. Footnotes are vastly more useful because they reside near the location of the principal work.
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#13Genius needs to differentiate between intra-textual annotation (i.e. what it currently does now, a variant on footnotes), inter-textual annotation (i.e. hyperlinks with accompanying comments, basically what hacker news or reddit does now), and meta-textual annotation (i.e. criticism and analysis).
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#14Most of their rap annotations are either inaccurate or complete bullshit. When it comes to "definitions" of slang, they're usually pretty good - for example, dun-ta-duns mention. When it comes to more subjective analysis of prose though it's pretty laughable how bad/ill-equipped the contributors tend to be at it - for example, "sleep is the cousin of death."
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#15It'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.
The shift of focus away from lyrics towards annotating texts that require more academic rigour (literature, historic documents, news) combined with the brash, public personalities of the owners make me think it will be a bigger problem for these guys than for others. Either way I think a collective "Wait a second..." is long overdue across the board, but that's the optimist in me.
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#16The 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…
> it contains a bunch of contrived ridiculous explanations for the meaning of lyrics that are very unlikely to be accurate
Yeah, x100. I'd say less than half the annotations I've read on there are even close to plausible, and most of the rest are too obvious to add any value.
I still prefer it over any other lyrics site because it's less 'sketchy' and you occasionally find a good annotation.
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#17This makes sense - a line-by-line analysis has limited utility for certain texts. I think the entertainment factor will keep the non-musical annotations burgeoning, and perhaps over time due to increased exposure, quality analysis will surface.
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#18The 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…
Annotations work particularly well in two contexts; first, when explaining the meaning of a single word
It's almost like people do not remember the mid-2000's where the New York times had the dictionary popups on their website. The worst user-interface that ever existed - double clicking (or highlighting? I don't remember) would display a modal popup with the word definition. This happened on every word, so oftentimes they would popup definitions for 'for', 'and', etc. It was highly intrusive (the NY Times removed the behavior after widespread consternation, turned it into a small '?' behavior).
Maybe if everyone expects that behavior all of the time, it would be worthwhile, and people could get used to it. As it stood on a single website, it was not very valuable.
If you are curious, here is an article from 2011 about the types of words that were looked up using the service: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/07/nytimes-coms-most-looked-up...
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#19I am the co-founder of Open Rev. (www.openrev.org), a platform where researchers can collaboratively annotate research publications and scientific books. I am a physicist and we designed our platform such that scientists can explain complex scientific contexts to each other (latex, markdown, image support).
I presume that there will be little “where is this reference from” but more “what does this word mean” (for example look at all these acronyms in biology and chemistry papers).
Third kind of annotations is simply posting links to good references. From tests in Physics classes it turns out this is what students did and liked a lot. Sometimes its just damn hard to find a good explanation or image of a physical concept.
That brings me to my last group of annotations: Explanations. That is the rephrasing of the scientific language that is sometimes written truly encrypted. We also anticipate people to improve the scientific content by suggestions new solutions, highlight flaws, post missing derivations, etc. This is likely the hardest annotation form, since it requires "academic rigour" as some of you have noted. And this is what we are shooting for.
Re: Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
#20The 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…
I came across this lyric recently and was curious if it was a reference:
> Lyrics hear it fear it can’t get near it
> Got a sample didn’t clear it
> Point blank says "fuck 5-0!" That’s the spirit
The annotation on rapgenius referenced NWA's popular song, rather than provide any real context. A quick google search showed that Point Blank was a rap group and that they had a track with a common lyric being "fuck 5-0", it may have even been the name of the track. It's frustrating to see someone put a half-assed guess that is quickly shown to be wrong rather than providing context to an otherwise obvious reference.