For this lab, I chose to use Genius as a means of annotating the fourth chapter of Henry Adam’s autobiography The Education of Henry Adams. I chose Genius as I found it more straight forward and intuitive than Diigo or Hypothes.is, and even more importantly Genius seems to hold the largest market share of the three engines. Personally I felt that by contributing to a database with these two traits would not only allow my work to reach and hopefully help a wider range of readers and inspire fellow scholars and contributors in their efforts to help decode this text.
With that in mind, I tried my hand at several different types of annotations that I thought could be helpful both in terms of clarifying the subject matter discussed in the chapter as well as elaborating on references in the text that may have been unclear to the reader. After reading through the chapter, I decided that two major concepts worth annotating were the development of Adams’ distaste for his education as well as the reasoning behind his bond with the Virginian students at Harvard College. I chose these topics because of how aggressive Adams was in his description of his Harvard experience. By digging deeper I felt that the true value added was that I had begun to develop the notion of Adams as a unique, albeit offbeat intellectual, a notion I feel could be built upon by further annotation of the autobiography. After taking a further look at Adams’ early education at the Private Latin School, my second thoughts regarding the development of the friendship between Adams and the southerners became much more clear.
Beyond my major query of Adams’ distaste for his education and the subsequent development of his friendship with the Virginians of Harvard. I developed some anecdotal annotations both out of curiosity and as a means of further advancing my argument and Adams’ rhetoric regarding his opinions of Harvard.
In short, I feel that my annotations were successful in helping to clarify the narrative, and I look forward to being able to leverage the power of Genius to improve my own digital history project later on in the semester.
Here is the link for the annotated chapter on Genius: Chapter 4 of The Education of Henry Adams