tate it.Whenever an annotation was added to a Madison document, a few technical features helped to further facilitate conversation. First, the document’s sponsor was automatically notified of a new annotation. Second, the annotation also appeared in-line as marginalia that could be responded to, liked, or flagged by others. And third, the annotation was displayed as a “comment” along with others at the end of the document. This process was described as “the future of crowdsourced legislation,” and illustrated how social and collaborative annotation could contribute to and improve civic life.Among noTroy Hicks1 week agoIt seems that these technical features were ones that, I am assuming, where only known and used by a very few of the users. Again, speaking to power and access, what does that mean for the kinds of democratized annotation experiences that we aspire to? How is this (entirely) dissimilar from conversations on social media, perhaps even off-putting or inaccessible to average users?
Or additionally consider the vast amounts of un-curated noise that annotations may make in instances like these when they hit larger scale. How can these systems better delineate the authority of the individual authors?
As a foil, consider how often people may read the several thousands of comments on a particular New York Times article? How many readers delve into these conversations and interact with them—particularly when they aren’t moderated or are overpopulated by trolls? We need better UI to indicate those annotating with some authority (or provide their background and expertise) or who may even be the original author responding to questions.