Aspects of the assignment, particularly the annotation section, felt more explicit, structured, and guided when composed in XML as opposed to written straight into a word processor. I composed all of the writing in oXygen itself, and as a result my annotations were strongly based on the element structure, including the relevant tags and what they were meant to contain. While it felt somewhat tedious to complete each element individually to meet the requirements, I did find that the structure made the requirements of the assignment specific, and I felt I had little to do once I had completed each of the required elements.
The citation portion of the assignment felt more tedious, and although in XML it allowed for each component to be more explicit, I felt it to almost be more work than it was worth to surround each component of the citation in a separate element, especially considering the appearance of the final product is no different from the directly copied version of the citation from the source material. It also felt tedious to specifically label each component when, at least from my perspective, the component identities are self-evident (tagging the first [last name, initial] as <author n=”1″> felt, to some degree, redundantly obvious. In situations where citing journal publications that had so many authors that the citation format itself lists the intermediary supporting authors as […], I opted to only specify the primary author with an n=”” attribute, and lumped the remaining 7+ authors into a separate <author> element with nonspecified [n] attribute simply in the interest of time. In this respect, I feel that the XML format of the assignment in a way broke down, in that it, if carried out in exact accordance with the schema, an excessively redundant amount of input would have been required (to number each author individually).
Ultimately, I felt that the process of writing the assignment in XML was overall smooth and simple, and added a layer of explicit structure that lent itself to automatically fulfilling the requirements of the assignment. Moving forward, I would have no problem using oXygen to continue working on future assignments. However, in the case of sources with an unreasonable number of cited authors, the system itself began to break down. If I were to change the schema, I would explicitly restructure the attribute types for author to be “primary” and “supporting” instead of numbering.
As I understand it, the social action involved in writing an annotated bibliography is that it opens up a connection between source and citer, in that the citer highlights the key takeaways from the source and creates a document of sources that are all related in some way, sources that previously may not have been linked before. This allows for a network to develop between these sources for the authors and/or users of the annotated bibliography to draw connections between the different cited works, and as a result, generate new perspectives and ideas relating to the core/central problem or challenge.
