Modelling network dynamics in social annotation

Web annotation technology is used in education to facilitate individual learning and social interaction. Departing from a conceptual exploration of social interaction in web annotation as a mediated process, as well as a dissatisfaction with analytical methods applied to web annotation data, we analyzed student interaction data from a web annotation environment following the Relational Event Modelling approach. Included in our modelling were various annotation attributes, a contextual factor of student groups, and several social and spatiotemporal factors related to network formation. Results indicated that longer annotations were slightly more likely to attract replies, students in the same project group were not more likely to engage with each other, and several network factors such as student activity, reciprocity, annotation popularity, and annotation location played important roles in interaction dynamics. This study contributes empirical insights into web annotation and calls for future work to investigate mediated social interaction as a dynamic network phenomenon.