annotext is a web-based application that was developed at Dartmouth College to assist students in tackling difficult texts. It offers an alternative to such traditional reading aids as word lists, footnotes, or even standard German-English dictionaries. In essence, students access an especially-prepared work on-line and then click on any word or phrase to receive its meaning instantly. The result is a kind of pony, but one that supplies information only as it is requested.¹

At the moment, the available texts are:

More are on the way. The works chosen are necessarily in the public domain. They also reflect the developer's personal preferences.

To access annotext you must use one of the following browsers: Firefox, Mozilla, or Netscape (Internet Explorer and Safari do not work). Go to http://annotext.dartmouth.edu/

Click on "Browse Texts" and open the text of your choice (don't "download"). Be patient: it takes a minute.

Your browser window will now display the scrollable text. Note that you can resize the window or enlarge the font.

A few of the available works are divided into parts. Faust, for example, initially shows only the Zueignung. To see subsequent parts, you use the drop-down menu labeled "Choose Chapter". Werther, on the other hand, is one continuous file.

annotext stores vocabulary items in three different ways. The following examples are also from Faust.

• A majority of the items are entered into a glossary as single words. If you want to see the definition of "Zueignung," for example, you simply click on that word and receive the definition in the box on the upper left:

  

  If "Zueignung" appeared anywhere else in the text, you could also click on it there and get the same definition. You can achieve the same result by typing "Zueignung" into the "Word lookup" box and clicking on "look up." This function allows you to process words that are not necessarily visible at the time. It has limited use, however, because it accesses only those words that are stored as generic items in the glossary, not as part of phrases (see below).

  Even such "generic" listings confine themselves to those meanings present in this particular text. Thus "Menge" is glossed only as "crowd, mob," since Faust does not use it in the mathematical sense. On the other hand, certain words will cause several possibilities to appear. Clicking on "liebe" will produce:

     lieb adj dear, precious
     die Liebe n love
     lieben v to love

  
  
• annotext also lemmatizes glossary entries, that is, it reconciles specific forms with a main entry. In line 1198 ("Vernunft fängt wieder an zu sprechen"), for example, a click on either "fängt" or "an" will call up "anfangen." Likewise, in the stage direction before line 460 ("Schlägt unwillig das Buch um"), clicking on either "Schlägt" or "um" will bring up "umschlagen":

  

  Note that in the above figure, the parts of the separable verb are colored red. The same is true in the next line for "einwirken auf." If you wish to see where such lemmatizations are found in the prepared text, you can choose the color display under "Options":

  

  (Pay no attention to the other options - they aren't available yet).
  

• Finally, annotext can also gloss unique phrases, which are marked in green when the color option is in effect:

  

  Here "nicht einmal dir" is treated as a unique occurrence. In Faust this option is employed particularly often, resulting almost in line-by-line translations. One point: there is considerable overlap between the "red" and "green" functions that deal with phrases. The reader who selects the "display colors" option will soon conclude that the distinctions between the red and green markings are not always obvious (or important).

All glossary entries of whatever type have been shaped by pedagogical considerations, i.e. they are based on an estimation of what students might find problematic. At the same time, however, there was an attempt to cover every possible item, so that no inquiry might go unanswered. Most glosses are only linguistic, but occasionally more interpretive information is added. When Mephisto refers to Naples in line 2982, for example, the gloss points to that city's connection with syphillis. And in the case of Werther's Ossian translation, each paragraph is glossed by Macpherson's original. A future version of annotext will permit information in other media - a picture of the Dornenauszieher to accompany Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater, for example.