IRHS - Institutional Racism in Health and Science
Annotate
Annotation is the first step of applying the instrument. You should strive to read the entire text from start to finish. As you go, take note and annotate key words, phrases, sentences, and passages with one or more hashtag labels from a controlled “hashtagulary” as described below. The reason for annotating using a controlled set of hashtags is to allow different readers’ annotations to be explicitly compared, facilitating the identification of patterns using textual analysis.
Consider the following passage published by Charles Davenport in 1928 in the journal The Scientific Monthly, which was incorporated into the journal Science in 1958:
There exists in mankind a strong instinct for homogeneity. Even children tend to mock at the cripple or deformed person. A homogeneous group of white people will always be led by its instincts to segregate itself from Negroes, Chinese and other groups that are morphologically dissimilar from themselves. We should consider the psychological, instinctive basis of this feeling. It is not sufficient merely to denounce it. It probably has a deep biological meaning and so long as it exists, so long we should be led to follow it as a guide if we are to seek to establish a commonwealth characterized by peace and unity of ideals.
We might consider annotating this passage with three hashtags: #generalization, #opinion, #speculation. The parts of the passage annotated to each hashtag are highlighted in the corresponding color for this example:
There exists in mankind a strong instinct for homogeneity. Even children tend to mock at the cripple or deformed person. A homogeneous group of white people will always be led by its instincts to segregate itself from Negroes, Chinese and other groups that are morphologically dissimilar from themselves. We should consider the psychological, instinctive basis of this feeling. It is not sufficient merely to denounce it. It probably has a deep biological meaning and so long as it exists, so long we should be led to follow it as a guide if we are to seek to establish a commonwealth characterized by peace and unity of ideals.
This is not the only way to annotate this passage, and other hashtags are also appropriate, but this serves to illustrate the principle. Also note that for clarity of this example only one hashtag is used to annotate any one passage but multiple hashtags might be appropriate for the same words or phrases.
The Hashtagulary Top
The “hashtagulary” (i.e. a portmanteau of “hashtag” and “vocabulary” that we made up) is a defined set of hashtags we will use to annotate portions (e.g. sentences) of a text. By annotating a text with a controlled vocabulary of hashtags, we can create a well-defined dataset that enables meaningful quantitative analysis.
The current hashtagulary contains the following hashtags:
| Hashtag | Meaning |
|---|---|
| assumption | accepted as true or correct without explicit justification or evidence |
| evidence | a fact or result that provides support for a claim |
| exclusive | idea or claim explicitly excludes a group of people |
| generalization | a general statement or concept obtained by inference from specific cases. |
| hogwash | Nonsense (tongue in cheek :P) |
| inclusive | idea or claim explicitly includes a group of people |
| interpretation | a belief or opinion that the author holds to follow from a piece of evidence or claim |
| lacks-definition | a key term used without explicit definition, or assumes reader has a particular definition |
| opinion | a view or judgment about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge |
| refuted | other existing evidence directly contradicts the idea or claim |
| speculation | the forming of a theory or conjecture without explicit or comprehensive evidence |
| substantiated | adequate evidence is provided for idea or claim |
| supposition | an uncertain belief |
| unsubstantiated | no supporting evidence provided for idea or claim |
As mentioned, the purpose of the controlled hashtagulary is to enable meaningful textual analysis of annotations made by many people of the same text, thus enabling algorithmic characterization of the presence and specific passages that might contain bias. While reading, endeavor to use these exact hashtags while annotating. However, if you feel an annotation is appropriate for which there is not currently a hashtag, you are encouraged to make such annotations! The hashtagulary should be dynamic, and if a new hashtag appears as often used it may be incorporated into the instrument in the future.
Perusall Top
We will use the Perusall web app to perform and record our annotations. This quick video guide explains how to annotate documents in perusall. The images below also show the steps of how to annotate.
