Use Cases/Copy-editing

Copy-editing use case.

Scenario

Given this passage:

"The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex 
subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment 
and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to 
look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.”
– Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

The author's copy-editor wants to make a suggestion to alter the word "change" to "transformation", and also to provide a rationale for the suggested change, in a single annotation.

There are several alternate interfaces that would have the same underlying data-model representation, but a slightly different workflow and visual appearance:

Dialog-based

The copy-editor selects the word "change" and clicks a button to start an annotation. In a dialog (maybe in the sidebar), there is a comment field, in which the author types:

"Change is a bit dry, why don't you punch it up a bit?"

Then the copy-editor selects the "suggest" option, which opens another text field for the substitution text, in which the copy-editor types, "transformation" as an explicit suggestion.

Document editor (Google Docs, MS Word, etc.)

The copy-editor makes the change inline, and provides the rationale in the sidebar note; in the document itself the word "change" is struck through, and the word "transformation" is added, like so:

"The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex 
subjects of life: in changetransformation, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment 
and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to 
look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.”
– Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

Traditional copy-edit emulator

A pen-tablet interface might simulate the traditional copy-edit experience, including the use of copy-edit symbols, with which many copy-editors are fluent and comfortable; in this case:

The copy-editor strikes through the word "change", adds a caret (^), and writes the the word "transformation" above the struck word, then writes the rational in the margin. The annotation app infers that these 3 actions (the strike-through, the caret-and-replacement, and the marginalia) are part of the same annotation (because of the timing and sequence the copy-editor used), and creates an single annotation; the app uses handwriting recognition to convert the substitute word and the marginalia to digital text, with the appropriate body and motivation for each, and also preserves the image of the handwriting for rendering (as a third body, with a custom motivation like "drawing", perhaps with a raster or SVG content) or for verification if the handwriting was incorrectly recognized.

Accepting changes

Because the text replacement and the rationale/comment are stored separately and given clear motivations, the final editor of the document can simply accept changes with a single action (per annotation, or in bulk for all suggested changes), rather than performing each change manually by typing in the suggested words. Also, a clear change history is generated and preserved.

In the case of the copy-edit emulator, where an additional body is generated, the final editor's UA may or may not render the stored handwriting, depending on their UA's capabilities; but in any case, the annotator's intent is captured and made actionable.

Requirements

1. Each body and target must be able to have its own motivation, rather than a single motivation for the whole annotation
2. A specific motivation (e.g. "editing" or "copyediting") must be defined
3. A specific UA behavior for the copy-editing motivation must be defined
   • We could define a class of conforming User Agent, a Copy-Editing UA, and put requirements on that class of UA that when given an annotation with a body with an "editing" motivation and a text-quote selector, it must offer the option to substitute the "value" of the body for the "exact" of the target selector (and if there are multiple bodies with an "editing" motivation, offer each as an option).