Textarium: Entangling Annotation, Abstraction and Argument

2025-09-16

AI Summary

This study addresses the opacity and poor shareability of interpretive processes in academic reading and writing. To this end, we propose a digital interpretive framework integrating close reading and distant reading, implemented as a unified web-based environment supporting text annotation, conceptual abstraction, and argument generation. Methodologically, we adopt a human–computer collaborative paradigm: users extract concepts via highlighting and keyword clustering, then anchor observations as reusable argument units; the system dynamically models interpretation through parameterized visualization states and co-evolving iterative prototyping, enabling real-time sharing and refinement. Our key contribution is the first formal structuring of interpretive practice—comprising annotation, abstraction, and argumentation—into a traceable, collaborative, and reusable digital narrative workflow. This significantly enhances transparency, reproducibility, and collaborative efficiency in hermeneutic activities within humanities computing.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Explainable and interpretable methods for personalization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Bridging structured and unstructured data

Abstract

We present a web-based environment that connects annotation, abstraction, and argumentation during the interpretation of text. As a visual interface for scholarly reading and writing, Textarium combines human analysis with lightweight computational processing to bridge close and distant reading practices. Readers can highlight text, group keywords into concepts, and embed these observations as anchors in essays. The interface renders these interpretive actions as parameterized visualization states. Through a speculative design process of co-creative and iterative prototyping, we developed a reading-writing approach that makes interpretive processes transparent and shareable within digital narratives.

Problem

• Integrating annotation, abstraction, and argumentation in text interpretation
• Bridging close and distant reading through computational processing
• Making interpretive processes transparent within digital narratives

Innovation

• Web-based environment connecting annotation, abstraction, argumentation
• Combines human analysis with lightweight computational processing
• Renders interpretive actions as parameterized visualization states