Abstract

Even though there is an abundance of web-based annotation tools that allow users to share their data across the internet, little is known about how these tools are actually used in the daily work routines of scholars in the Humanities. This chapter presents an empirical study on public inline annotations by publishers, article authors and readers in a scholarly open-access journal. The findings of this study are combined with a meta-analysis of the existing empirical literature on marginal annotations in the Humanities and scholars’ willingness to share them. The most important conclusion that can be drawn from the empirical data is that the publication of annotations is not a feature that needs to be offered by all types of scholarly annotation software packages.