Close Reading of Biblical Texts and Treebanks with genius.com, hypothes.is, and pund.it

Collaborative annotation software was popularized by general purpose annotation tools like genius.com, originally designed for close reading of rap lyrics, and hypothes.is and pund.it, designed for general purpose scholarly annotation. They have been used to do close reading of literature and historical documents, to fact check political speeches, to review scientific literature, and in other domains where careful reading and discussion are important. With these tools, it is possible to create public annotations or to define private workgroups. These tools allow a user to highlight a region of the text and comment on it by creating an annotation. They can also comment on another annotation, resulting in threads of discussion of the details of the text, which is always the central focus. This talk will look at how these tools are used to annotate biblical texts and related materials in both original and modern languages, explore the integration points that allow them to be embedded on websites or to allow data to be collected from the annotations, and explore ways to use them productively for research and in the classroom. It will also look at some of the limitations of these tools for particular uses.