Annotating documents
January 6, 2010 8:42 AM Subscribe
How to annotate and correct self-created bilingual documents?
Paper is excellent for this kind of thing, but I'm looking at solving it electronically.
Imagine a line of text, written in English, by a student. Below that line is the (hopefully) equivalent in German. Or French. Or Italian.
The foreign text has the gender of the nouns marked and labelled, perhaps the tenses too.
And then the teacher comes along and corrects it all.
I *could* have an openoffice writer file that has four lines per sentence, but this is messy (wrapping won't work), and doesn't allow nice annotation.
I imagine this problem is a common one - how have others solved it?
(cross platform, open standards, etc. please!)
Paper is excellent for this kind of thing, but I'm looking at solving it electronically.
Imagine a line of text, written in English, by a student. Below that line is the (hopefully) equivalent in German. Or French. Or Italian.
The foreign text has the gender of the nouns marked and labelled, perhaps the tenses too.
And then the teacher comes along and corrects it all.
I *could* have an openoffice writer file that has four lines per sentence, but this is messy (wrapping won't work), and doesn't allow nice annotation.
I imagine this problem is a common one - how have others solved it?
(cross platform, open standards, etc. please!)
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I'm not aware of any packaged product or webapp that will do this, but I think a wiki might be the right way to go. They have built-in version control, so the student can enter the bilingual text, the teacher can mark it up, and the changes can be highlighted.
I would probably do alternating paragraphs rather than alternating lines, but either way, it would work. You could get fancy and use table markup (templates can facilitate this) to create side-by-side texts.
There are a lot of different kinds of wiki software out there. Mediawiki (the one that Wikipedia runs on) has a lot of flexibility. Obviously this would be a cross-platform single-install kind of thing. Many web hosting companies will offer one-click install for Mediawiki.
posted by adamrice at 1:49 PM on January 6, 2010