Digital Mappa – Simple and Web-based Annotations. Tool review

How does Digital Mappa, a browser-based annotation tool, fit into the current landscape of Virtual Research Environments? How is an intuitive WYSIWYG graphical user interface suited for simple (scholarly) editions and image-text representations? What about involving different users via crowdsourcing? For this review, we took three distinct perspectives (user, teacher, and backend admin) and tested the tool for text annotation but furthermore for linking images with text. Digital Mappa proves to be a stable, not-so-easy-to-set-up tool that covers a lot of ground concerning annotation and image linking. Subsuming, we describe a mature system that allows for easy editing, suitable in the classroom. Critically, it has been assessed that the tool refrains from standards (such as TEI XML) and lacks capabilities to involve larger groups (e.g. for crowdsourcing).