Why Genius may struggle to annotate the world
themassolit.wordpress.com
themassolit.wordpress.com
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.
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:
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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.
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.
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.
It's almost like people do not remember the mid-2000's where the New York times had the dictionary popups on their website. The worst user-interface that ever existed - double clicking (or highlighting? I don't remember) would display a modal popup with the word definition. This happened on every word, so oftentimes they would popup definitions for 'for', 'and', etc. It was highly intrusive (the NY Times removed the behavior after widespread consternation, turned it into a small '?' behavior).
Maybe if everyone expects that behavior all of the time, it would be worthwhile, and people could get used to it. As it stood on a single website, it was not very valuable.
If you are curious, here is an article from 2011 about the types of words that were looked up using the service: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/07/nytimes-coms-most-looked-up...
> Lyrics hear it fear it can’t get near it
> Got a sample didn’t clear it
> Point blank says "fuck 5-0!" That’s the spirit
The annotation on rapgenius referenced NWA's popular song, rather than provide any real context. A quick google search showed that Point Blank was a rap group and that they had a track with a common lyric being "fuck 5-0", it may have even been the name of the track. It's frustrating to see someone put a half-assed guess that is quickly shown to be wrong rather than providing context to an otherwise obvious reference.
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.
This is hardly some daring new business model.
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.