5 ms·

Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world

56 points by christudor 12y ago

thathonkey 12y ago
Most of their rap annotations are either inaccurate or complete bullshit. When it comes to "definitions" of slang, they're usually pretty good - for example, dun-ta-duns mention. When it comes to more subjective analysis of prose though it's pretty laughable how bad/ill-equipped the contributors tend to be at it - for example, "sleep is the cousin of death."
zallarak 12y ago
This makes sense - a line-by-line analysis has limited utility for certain texts. I think the entertainment factor will keep the non-musical annotations burgeoning, and perhaps over time due to increased exposure, quality analysis will surface.
streptomycin 12y ago
The example it uses of a good annotation, When Nas speaks about “sleep [being] the cousin of death”, Genius tells me the line is ‘perhaps inspired by the Talmud (which tells us that sleep is 1/60th of death) or the Iliad (where Hypnos and Thanatos – i.e. “sleep” and “death” – are described as brothers)’. is more like an example of a bad annotation. Really, we're supposed to believe that 19 year old Nas was referencing the Talmud? This is basically the stereotype of Rap Genius, that it contains a bunch of contrived ridiculous explanations for the meaning of lyrics that are very unlikely to be accurate. Another problem on Rap Genius is that sometimes the annotations are more jokes than explanations. Judging by the downvotes people get here for posting Reddit-like jokes, I think we are all aware of the near-universal problem of jokes being upvoted over "real" content. And one more comment... Annotations work particularly well in two contexts; first, when explaining the meaning of a single word I don't know if that is true. It depends on what assumptions you make about the reader. Obviously it would be bad to annotate every single word with its definition, that would be overkill. But where do you draw the line? There's no universal answer. For example, I'm sure that many people have heard the word "ratchet" in rap songs without knowing what it means, but if you look up songs with that word on Rap Genius, the annotation is most likely not a definition. Probably either no annotation or a joke, since contributors to Rap Genius all already know what "ratchet" means.
- blt 12y ago
  > it contains a bunch of contrived ridiculous explanations for the meaning of lyrics that are very unlikely to be accurate Yeah, x100. I'd say less than half the annotations I've read on there are even close to plausible, and most of the rest are too obvious to add any value. I still prefer it over any other lyrics site because it's less 'sketchy' and you occasionally find a good annotation.
- minikites 12y ago
  Why couldn't 19 year old Nas reference the Talmud? The goal of any critical reading isn't necessarily to reverse engineer the author's intended meaning, it's to examine the work in context: ------------------ http://johngreenbooks.com/questions-about-the-fault-in-our-stars-spoilers/ http://johngreenbooks.com/questions-about-the-fault-in-our-s... Q. Isn’t authorial intent important in terms of communication between reader and writer? A. But it ISN’T a conversation between you and me if all you’re doing is attempting to understand what I’m saying. That’s just you LISTENING to me, which is kind of boring. Like, don’t get me wrong, that act of listening to art/media can be pleasantly distracting and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. That’s essentially what watching an episode of NCIS is, I’d argue: The show knows who killed the person and you don’t and then at the end they tell you. But I think what happens when you read a book—ideally, anyway—is much more complicated and beautiful and collaborative. My intent as an author matters some, but you as the reader get some agency, too. You get to discover meaning within the story, and sometimes the meaning you discover will be meaning I hoped you would discover, and sometimes it will be meaning I could never have imagined you discovering. But together, we get to build something that matters to you (hopefully), and that brings you pleasure and consolation and a feeling of unaloneness that you can never get from merely listening.
  - magicalist 12y ago
    Authorial intent isn't privileged in a critical reading of a text, except when you use phrases like "perhaps inspired by the Talmud", at which point you're making comments about authorial intent. I'm going to have to go with the GP on this (though the article itself isn't very good). A very large percentage of Rap Genius annotations are just useless, and that's just out of the ones that are trying to be helpful instead of making a joke or providing information that's plain wrong. Even forgiving for direct appeal to what the lyricist supposedly meant, annotations seem to jump to the very first connection the annotator thought of, and the number of annotations for the same line (and the number of votes weighing the alternative annotations) is so low that a signal isn't rising out of the noise. Maybe that's just for the entries I end up looking at on there, but they aren't exactly obscure songs.
amvp 12y ago
I agree somewhat, but I think the article underlines a problem with the Genius UI as it is now, rather than the concept. The current Genius UI of 'annotation' restricts the concept to highlighting words and phrases. This is limiting. But annotation thats both richer and looser would be more flexible: Allowing people to reference chapters or sections more generally, and potentially multiple sections simultaneously and cross reference annotations themselves. I could see utility in something that allowed the creation of CliffNotes style context alongside the real content. And that also falls under the umbrella of 'annotation' in my mind. There's also potential in the idea of real-time annotation, rather than the snapshot, more curated content they seem to have now. Doing any of this in a way that isn't overly complex or cumbersome will be tricky, and I've no idea if it's a direction that the creators want (or can) develop it in. Genius were a lyrics site with an interesting javascript UI and great SEO. They sold that JS UI as part of a bigger picture. But for the reasons the article mentions that JS UI isn't going to take them there. Hopefully they can use that 15 million to build something that will.
walterbell 12y ago
Related: videos & slides from April 2014 W3C annotation workshop, http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/ http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/
raldi 12y ago
Since the article takes a while to get to the point teased by the headline, I'll spoil it here: The author believes that most non-rap works spread their references and allusions across a wide body of words, which allegedly makes them too hard to annotate.
service 12y ago
It's a for-profit site that runs off unpaid/donated microlabor. It's gonna take some serious gamification to keep that model palatable to contributors if/when the cash start rolling in (or they get a big exit, etc).
- booruguru 12y ago
  What on Earth are you talking about? iFixit, Wikia, and many others make money based on people generating high-quality content for free. This is hardly some daring new business model.
  - service 12y ago
    The shift of focus away from lyrics towards annotating texts that require more academic rigour (literature, historic documents, news) combined with the brash, public personalities of the owners make me think it will be a bigger problem for these guys than for others. Either way I think a collective "Wait a second..." is long overdue across the board, but that's the optimist in me.
sparkzilla 12y ago
It would be great is the article could be annotated. http://wordpress.org/plugins/livefyre-sidenotes/ http://wordpress.org/plugins/livefyre-sidenotes/
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
MisterBastahrd 12y ago
Genius is in the concordance business. They need to be in the footnote business. Footnotes are vastly more useful because they reside near the location of the principal work.
metaphorm 12y ago
Genius needs to differentiate between intra-textual annotation (i.e. what it currently does now, a variant on footnotes), inter-textual annotation (i.e. hyperlinks with accompanying comments, basically what hacker news or reddit does now), and meta-textual annotation (i.e. criticism and analysis).
ebauch 12y ago
I am the co-founder of Open Rev. (www.openrev.org), a platform where researchers can collaboratively annotate research publications and scientific books. I am a physicist and we designed our platform such that scientists can explain complex scientific contexts to each other (latex, markdown, image support). I presume that there will be little “where is this reference from” but more “what does this word mean” (for example look at all these acronyms in biology and chemistry papers). Third kind of annotations is simply posting links to good references. From tests in Physics classes it turns out this is what students did and liked a lot. Sometimes its just damn hard to find a good explanation or image of a physical concept. That brings me to my last group of annotations: Explanations. That is the rephrasing of the scientific language that is sometimes written truly encrypted. We also anticipate people to improve the scientific content by suggestions new solutions, highlight flaws, post missing derivations, etc. This is likely the hardest annotation form, since it requires "academic rigour" as some of you have noted. And this is what we are shooting for.

56 points by christudor 12y ago

Most of their rap annotations are either inaccurate or complete bullshit. When it comes to "definitions" of slang, they're usually pretty good - for example, dun-ta-duns mention. When it comes to more subjective analysis of prose though it's pretty laughable how bad/ill-equipped the contributors tend to be at it - for example, "sleep is the cousin of death."

zallarak 12y ago

This makes sense - a line-by-line analysis has limited utility for certain texts. I think the entertainment factor will keep the non-musical annotations burgeoning, and perhaps over time due to increased exposure, quality analysis will surface.

streptomycin 12y ago

The example it uses of a good annotation, When Nas speaks about “sleep [being] the cousin of death”, Genius tells me the line is ‘perhaps inspired by the Talmud (which tells us that sleep is 1/60th of death) or the Iliad (where Hypnos and Thanatos – i.e. “sleep” and “death” – are described as brothers)’. is more like an example of a bad annotation. Really, we're supposed to believe that 19 year old Nas was referencing the Talmud? This is basically the stereotype of Rap Genius, that it contains a bunch of contrived ridiculous explanations for the meaning of lyrics that are very unlikely to be accurate. Another problem on Rap Genius is that sometimes the annotations are more jokes than explanations. Judging by the downvotes people get here for posting Reddit-like jokes, I think we are all aware of the near-universal problem of jokes being upvoted over "real" content. And one more comment... Annotations work particularly well in two contexts; first, when explaining the meaning of a single word I don't know if that is true. It depends on what assumptions you make about the reader. Obviously it would be bad to annotate every single word with its definition, that would be overkill. But where do you draw the line? There's no universal answer. For example, I'm sure that many people have heard the word "ratchet" in rap songs without knowing what it means, but if you look up songs with that word on Rap Genius, the annotation is most likely not a definition. Probably either no annotation or a joke, since contributors to Rap Genius all already know what "ratchet" means.

blt 12y ago
> it contains a bunch of contrived ridiculous explanations for the meaning of lyrics that are very unlikely to be accurate Yeah, x100. I'd say less than half the annotations I've read on there are even close to plausible, and most of the rest are too obvious to add any value. I still prefer it over any other lyrics site because it's less 'sketchy' and you occasionally find a good annotation.
minikites 12y ago
Why couldn't 19 year old Nas reference the Talmud? The goal of any critical reading isn't necessarily to reverse engineer the author's intended meaning, it's to examine the work in context: ------------------ http://johngreenbooks.com/questions-about-the-fault-in-our-stars-spoilers/ http://johngreenbooks.com/questions-about-the-fault-in-our-s... Q. Isn’t authorial intent important in terms of communication between reader and writer? A. But it ISN’T a conversation between you and me if all you’re doing is attempting to understand what I’m saying. That’s just you LISTENING to me, which is kind of boring. Like, don’t get me wrong, that act of listening to art/media can be pleasantly distracting and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. That’s essentially what watching an episode of NCIS is, I’d argue: The show knows who killed the person and you don’t and then at the end they tell you. But I think what happens when you read a book—ideally, anyway—is much more complicated and beautiful and collaborative. My intent as an author matters some, but you as the reader get some agency, too. You get to discover meaning within the story, and sometimes the meaning you discover will be meaning I hoped you would discover, and sometimes it will be meaning I could never have imagined you discovering. But together, we get to build something that matters to you (hopefully), and that brings you pleasure and consolation and a feeling of unaloneness that you can never get from merely listening.
- magicalist 12y ago
  Authorial intent isn't privileged in a critical reading of a text, except when you use phrases like "perhaps inspired by the Talmud", at which point you're making comments about authorial intent. I'm going to have to go with the GP on this (though the article itself isn't very good). A very large percentage of Rap Genius annotations are just useless, and that's just out of the ones that are trying to be helpful instead of making a joke or providing information that's plain wrong. Even forgiving for direct appeal to what the lyricist supposedly meant, annotations seem to jump to the very first connection the annotator thought of, and the number of annotations for the same line (and the number of votes weighing the alternative annotations) is so low that a signal isn't rising out of the noise. Maybe that's just for the entries I end up looking at on there, but they aren't exactly obscure songs.

amvp 12y ago

I agree somewhat, but I think the article underlines a problem with the Genius UI as it is now, rather than the concept. The current Genius UI of 'annotation' restricts the concept to highlighting words and phrases. This is limiting. But annotation thats both richer and looser would be more flexible: Allowing people to reference chapters or sections more generally, and potentially multiple sections simultaneously and cross reference annotations themselves. I could see utility in something that allowed the creation of CliffNotes style context alongside the real content. And that also falls under the umbrella of 'annotation' in my mind. There's also potential in the idea of real-time annotation, rather than the snapshot, more curated content they seem to have now. Doing any of this in a way that isn't overly complex or cumbersome will be tricky, and I've no idea if it's a direction that the creators want (or can) develop it in. Genius were a lyrics site with an interesting javascript UI and great SEO. They sold that JS UI as part of a bigger picture. But for the reasons the article mentions that JS UI isn't going to take them there. Hopefully they can use that 15 million to build something that will.

walterbell 12y ago

Related: videos & slides from April 2014 W3C annotation workshop, http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/ http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/

raldi 12y ago

Since the article takes a while to get to the point teased by the headline, I'll spoil it here: The author believes that most non-rap works spread their references and allusions across a wide body of words, which allegedly makes them too hard to annotate.

service 12y ago

It's a for-profit site that runs off unpaid/donated microlabor. It's gonna take some serious gamification to keep that model palatable to contributors if/when the cash start rolling in (or they get a big exit, etc).

booruguru 12y ago
What on Earth are you talking about? iFixit, Wikia, and many others make money based on people generating high-quality content for free. This is hardly some daring new business model.
- service 12y ago
  The shift of focus away from lyrics towards annotating texts that require more academic rigour (literature, historic documents, news) combined with the brash, public personalities of the owners make me think it will be a bigger problem for these guys than for others. Either way I think a collective "Wait a second..." is long overdue across the board, but that's the optimist in me.

sparkzilla 12y ago

It would be great is the article could be annotated. http://wordpress.org/plugins/livefyre-sidenotes/ http://wordpress.org/plugins/livefyre-sidenotes/

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

MisterBastahrd 12y ago

Genius is in the concordance business. They need to be in the footnote business. Footnotes are vastly more useful because they reside near the location of the principal work.

metaphorm 12y ago

Genius needs to differentiate between intra-textual annotation (i.e. what it currently does now, a variant on footnotes), inter-textual annotation (i.e. hyperlinks with accompanying comments, basically what hacker news or reddit does now), and meta-textual annotation (i.e. criticism and analysis).

ebauch 12y ago

I am the co-founder of Open Rev. (www.openrev.org), a platform where researchers can collaboratively annotate research publications and scientific books. I am a physicist and we designed our platform such that scientists can explain complex scientific contexts to each other (latex, markdown, image support). I presume that there will be little “where is this reference from” but more “what does this word mean” (for example look at all these acronyms in biology and chemistry papers). Third kind of annotations is simply posting links to good references. From tests in Physics classes it turns out this is what students did and liked a lot. Sometimes its just damn hard to find a good explanation or image of a physical concept. That brings me to my last group of annotations: Explanations. That is the rephrasing of the scientific language that is sometimes written truly encrypted. We also anticipate people to improve the scientific content by suggestions new solutions, highlight flaws, post missing derivations, etc. This is likely the hardest annotation form, since it requires "academic rigour" as some of you have noted. And this is what we are shooting for.