I like their idea about Twitter being an annotation tool and to some extent it is, and a good one at that. However, we still need to address the distribution mechanism and the fact that Tweets like this are often bereft of context and cause context collapse.

Quote tweets and dunking mechanisms would be interesting to study in this context, particularly in a world where people often delete tweets (dunked or not) which means the original context is gone or missing and we're only left with an orphaned annotation.

Other cultural examples of missing context include commentary for live sporting or cultural events like the Super Bowl, World Series, World Cup Soccer, or the Academy Awards. Watchers will comment on something in real time (often even without an identifying or contextualizing hashtag, eg: #Oscars19), supposing an implied context from their audience, but later generations will be at odds to find or re-complete the original context.

I nearly added it above in the opening, but Maha’s comment reminds me of it again. In a countercultural way, a web developer created a browser plugin that will re-format all of Donald Trump’s tweets to appear as if they were written in crayon by an eight year old: http://maketrumptweetseightagain.com/

While not technically annotation in a “traditional” form discussed in the text so far—though close from the perspective of the redaction technique mentioned above—, by reformatting the font of Trumps tweets, it completely changes their context, meaning, and political weight.

But if we're going to consider music as art, isn't a lot of the value and power of art in the "eye of the beholder"? To some extent art's value is in the fact that it can have multiple interpretations. From this perspective, once it's been released, Lamar's music isn't "his" anymore, it becomes part of a broader public that will hear and interpret it as they want to. So while Lamar may go back and annotate what he may have meant at the time as an "expert", doesn't some of his art thereby lose some power in that he is tacitly stating that he apparently didn't communicate his original intent well?

By comparison and for contrast one could take the recent story of Donald Trump's speech (very obviously written by someone else) about the recent mass shootings and compare them with the polar opposite message he spews on an almost daily basis from his Twitter account. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/teleprompter-trump-meets-twitter-trump-as-the-president-responds-to-mass-slayings/2019/08/05/cdd8ea78-b799-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html

While I like the sentiment here, a lot of the power of the message comes from not only the medium, but the distribution which it receives. Many daily examples of "typical" annotation done by common people are done in a way that incredibly few will ultimately see the message. The fact that the annotations of the emperor were republished and distributed was what, in great part, gave them so much weight and value. Similarly here with the example of the King's blog or Alexandra Bell's work which was displayed in public. I hope there is more discussion about the idea of distribution in what follows.

While I'm reading this, I can't help but wishing that Hypothes.is would add a redaction functionality to their product. They could potentially effect it by using the highlighter functionality, but changing the CSS to have the color shown be the same as that of the (body) text instead of being yellow.

Another good example is the built up genealogy of family bibles inscribed with the names of owners and their family tree which are passed from one generation to the next. To some extent this is highlighted by the passages of the bible in which W begat X begat Y begat Z begat... (Genesis chapters 5 & 11).

Interesting use of digital highlights--determining how "read" a particular book is.

There are also now digital tools like Anki, Mnemosyne, and even Amazon's notebook tools that allow highlights and annotations in books to be transferred into digital flashcards to be used for spaced reviews of knowledge and information. I suspect that even students that heavily highlight their textbooks are rarely reviewing over those highlights after-the-fact, and have generally found this to be the case when asking those I see actively doing so.

Manuel Espinoza, “Keynote,” AnnotatED Summit, April 2, 2018, https://youtu.be/5LNmSjDHipM.

https://www.annotationstudio.org/

https://nowcomment.com

I find it somewhat interesting to note that with 246 public annotations on this page using Hypothes.is, that from what I can tell as of 4/2/2019 only one of them is a simple highlight. All the rest are highlights with an annotation or response of some sort.

It makes me curious to know what the percentage distribution these two types have on the platform. Is it the case that in classroom settings, which many of these annotations appear to have been made, that much of the use of the platform dictates more annotations (versus simple highlights) due to the performative nature of the process?

Is it possible that there are a significant number of highlights which are simply hidden because the platform automatically defaults these to private? Is the friction of making highlights so high that people don't bother?

I know that Amazon will indicate heavily highlighted passages in e-books as a feature to draw attention to the interest relating to those passages. Perhaps it would be useful/nice if Hypothes.is would do something similar, but make the author of the highlights anonymous? (From a privacy perspective, this may not work well on articles with a small number of annotators as the presumption could be that the "private" highlights would most likely be directly attributed to those who also made public annotations.

Perhaps the better solution is to default highlights to public and provide friction-free UI to make them private?

A heavily highlighted section by a broad community can be a valuable thing, but surfacing it can be a difficult thing to do.

I think that a major part of improving the issue of abuse and providing consent is building in notifications so that website owners will at least be aware that their site is being marked up, highlighted, annotated, and commented on in other locations or by other platforms. Then the site owner at least has the knowledge of what's happening and can then be potentially provided with information and tools to allow/disallow such interactions, particularly if they can block individual bad actors, but still support positive additions, thought, and communication. Ideally this blocking wouldn't occur site wide, which many may be tempted to do now as a knee-jerk reaction to recent events, but would be fine grained enough to filter out the worst offenders.

Toward the end of notifications to site owners, it would be great if any annotating activity would trigger trackbacks, pingbacks, or the relatively newer and better webmention protocol of the WW3C out of the http://IndieWebCamp.com movement. Then site owners would at least have notifications about what is happening on their site that might otherwise be invisible to them.

Perhaps there's a way to further implement filters or tools (a la Akismet on platforms like WordPress) that allow site users to mark materials as spam, abusive, or other so that they are then potentially moved from "public" facing to "private" so that the original highlighter can still see their notes, but that the platform isn't allowing the person's own website to act as a platform to give reach to bad actors.

Further some site owners might appreciate graded filters (G, PG, PG-13, R, X) so that users or even parents can filter what they're willing to see. Consider also annotations on narrative forms that might be posted as spoilers--how can these be guarded against? (Possibly with CSS and a spoiler tag?) Options can be built into the platform itself as well as allowing server-side options for truly hard cases.

My coding skills are rustier than I wish they were, but I'm available to help/consult if needed.

Turns out that because it's text-based, you can also annotate it with Hypothes.is!

Wait? What!? I've been wanting to be able to follow users annotations and I'd love the ability to monitor site annotations!! (I've even suggested that they added Webmention before to do direct notifications for site annotations.)

Where have you seen these things hiding Tom?

Does the script Audrey Watters is using really stop people from annotating her site directly?

Based on my quick test, one can still (carefully) use Hypothes.is to highlight and annotate her site, but the script at least prevents Hypothes.is from showing that annotation. When visiting her site with Hypothes.is' Chrome browser extension on, it does show that there is one annotation on the page. It then requires some hunting to find this comment.

I'm wondering if the NY Times used the summit to figure out how to prevent annotating at all? Somehow I'm not able to reasonably use either Hypothes.is or Genius with it in multiple browsers.

In particular I just can't highlight anything on the page, and attempts usually end up moving me to a new article. Blech!

Posting this solely to compare my Hypothes.is highlights and annotations on my website with Will's version.

I'm still tinkering with mine and should have a Micropub based version using IFTTT and Webhooks done soon.

John, you should spend a minute or two to learn about Hypothes.is (https://web.hypothes.is/) as an online tool for doing this. It's a free account or you can self-host the software yourself if you like. There are also functionalities to have public, private, or group annotations. I often pull my own annotations to my personal website similar to your own Memex and publish them there (example: https://boffosocko.com/kind/annotation/)

Syndicated copy: https://boffosocko.com/2020/05/21/55771248/)

compare to: https://hyp.is/Ngs_0v7VEeqTL8NOL_ME9A/github.com/sveltejs/svelte/issues/469

Grundlegender Artikel über die Verwendung von Web Annotations zum fact checking. Deses Konzept wurde von Climate Feedback – A Scientific Reference to Reliable Information on Climate Change umgesetzt. Interessant ist auch die Verbindung der Annotations mit unterschiedlichsten Arten von Metadaten.

Best line!

This reminds me of a tool called asciinema that allows highlighting text within a video.

This makes me wonder at annotations in scrolls (and how pointers may have worked) prior to the invention and proliferation of codices as a literary form.

If you see this annotation, you have annotations up and running :)

Here I'm reminded of Tom Standage's book Writing on the Wall: Social Media: The First 2,000 Years as potentially having some interesting examples that include the ideas of social media as an annotation layer on life.

social media: live annotations on life itself

I've added a few examples of abuse and conversation here in the past: https://indieweb.org/annotation#Annotation_Sites_Enable_Abuse

How would this have worked in pre-literate societies? Examples?

"the whole social body" also reminds me of the idea of the "Great Chain of Being" to consider how differences in annotation may change and evolve in societies over long periods of time. I can't help but consider Richard Dawkins' original conceptualization of the "meme" and how they move through societies with or without literacy skills.

These sorts of annotations can also help to force people who might not otherwise understand the subtlety of a piece to "read between the lines". I have to wonder about annotations as a means of apophasis as well...

Not having anywhere else to attach it yet, I also wonder about verbal annotations or asides in actual speech? Perhaps president George H.W. Bush's famous quote "Read my lips: no new taxes" could be considered an example of this sort of verbal annotation or highlighting?

What about examples of future sorts of annotations/redactions like these with emerging technologies? Stories about deepfakes (like Obama calling Trump a "dipshit" or the Youtube Channel Bad Lip Reading redubbing the words of Senator Ted Cruz) are becoming more prevalent and these are versions of this sort of redaction taken to greater lengths. At present, these examples are obviously fake and facetious, but in short order they will be indistinguishable and more commonplace.

Ultimately Audrey Watters rescinded the Creative Commons license on her website, though I don’t think she ever mentioned specifically why she made that change (nor does she need to publicly state a reason) though it may have had something to do with annotations and/or harassment she experienced at the time.

I do remember thinking at the time she was looking at those decisions that in some sense by allowing annotations on her site, she was providing a platform and distribution for others to potentially harass her.

Some pieces of that extended conversation:

https://boffosocko.com/2017/05/10/un-annotated-by-audrey-watters/

https://blog.jonudell.net/2017/06/27/annotating-thoughts-on-annotation/

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.

Or perhaps, even more fun, the Shelley-Goodwin Archive has a digital copy of the original text which preserves the original handwritten text as well as the editorial annotations!!

With this text appearing on bookbook.pubpub.org being an excellent example of just this. #meta

I'm sort of hoping for some discussion of Kathleen Fitzpatrick's process behind her book Planned Obsolescence which was released in draft form for open peer review in fall 2009, much like Annotations. It's the first example I can think of a scholar doing something like this digitally in public, though there may have been other earlier examples.

I suspect this is true, but only in some cases and not in all. For example, one must ask which of an author's publics are meant to see and engage with an annotation? Some platforms like Twitter obviously have a much larger public than something like Hypothes.is which is a smaller set, and then annotations an individual reader places in their copy of Beloved which may have a public of one--the author the annotation.

I have seen some cultures in movie theaters actively talk back to the movie on the movie screen, and this becomes part of a bigger communal conversation and reaction to the film being played.

Perhaps another historical example, though with different meaning is the placard cum annotation INRI which stood for "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum" a Latin phrase translated as "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." It was the notice Pontius Pilate nailed over Jesus as he was crucified.

Historians generally agree that this is one of the few facts that one can discern from the New Testament about the historical Jesus because it both runs at cross purposes to the ideas of early Christianity and it is multiply attested (Matthew 27:37, Mark 15:26, Luke 23:38, John 19:19).

It's an annotation which was remembered in oral tradition long enough to have been written down multiple times and which has sent both religious and cultural ripples throughout the ages.

To further the discussion of annotation in relation to this, John’s version has the chief priests of the Jews ask Pilate to have the annotation state “This man said, ‘I am King of the Jews’”, but “Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written.”

Perhaps another historical example, though with different meaning is the placard cum annotation INRI which stood for "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum" a Latin phrase translated as "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." It was the notice Pontius Pilate nailed over Jesus as he was crucified.

Historians generally agree that this is one of the few facts that one can discern from the New Testament about the historical Jesus because it both runs at cross purposes to the ideas of early Christianity and it is multiply attested (Matthew 27:37, Mark 15:26, Luke 23:38, John 19:19).

It's an annotation which was remembered in oral tradition long enough to have been written down multiple times and which has sent both religious and cultural ripples throughout the ages.

This is a good example and shows some great power, but where is the open annotation occuring? It seems obvious that they must have a closed group, but how does that information leak out of their mini-silo? When I visit the original page of the example it currently only shows one annotation. As a broader member of the general public, how do I have better access to expert groups and the annotations they're making on the things I'm actively reading?

Perhaps deeper than you want to go, but I'm curious about your thoughts on Medium's UI that allows in line commentary/comments/reactions (which are also given their own separate URL's which don't include all of their context) versus other platforms that would simply include those as comments at the bottom.

Though it could do more so if the text had additional blank marginal spaces for the reader to add their own commentary (or comments).

Before I even begin this section, I want to note my general thought that annotations prior to the spread of the internet (and even up until just the last few years, let's say to the birth of Hypothes.is) were generally seen by very few people--like those that wrote them and at best perhaps two or three others unless they were later moved into longer papers, speeches, or other material in another aggregated form. Owen Gingerich's study of this in The Book that Nobody Read is like an extreme case of the spread of annotations from professors to students and I suspect would be an outlier.

However even in the current climate with a more social media based networked set of annotations, they're still not widely used or distributed, though are becoming somewhat more so as the ease of use of the tools and the adoption by smaller groups takes hold. But even given this small growth, by analogy I might say that adoption of digital annotations are at the level of late first century Christianity--it's still small and is far from the spread and acceptance of, say, 17th century Christianity.

This is the label you were hoping someone would put on this right?

Image courtesy of icanhascheeseburger.

These are known as a chyron.

I can't help but glossthe word gloss, [a brief explanation (as in the margin or between the lines of a text) of a difficult or obscure word or expression].

It also seems a bit like the following paragraph actually glosses over a more concrete definition of the word?

Now I'm wondering how to effectuate an asterisk more simply on digital platforms.

• simply doesn't quite do it in an overlay system like hypothes.is though their highlight set up does quite well.

Perhaps bookbook.pubpub's annotation indicator could act as an asterisk whether the note field is empty or not?

Here I can't help but wonder about people who wrote their notes or annotations into their own personal commonplace books rather than directly in the texts themselves. Perhaps somewhat tangential to the broader ideas here, but do the annotations necessarily need to be in the text themselves? What sorts of separate lives do unlinked annotations go on to have? What do annotations over the ages have from living within the text itself, separately in notebooks, notecards, commonplace books, or even in the modern age with digital annotating tools that can be seen, read, and distributed to much larger audiences?

I’d agree. Annotations are a tool and can be used for both positive and negative outcomes.

Related somewhat to my bible example above, one could view the individual texts of the New Testament as annotations to the Hebrew bible, in which case they changed a movement from being a religion of Jesus to a religion about Jesus—one which not coincidentally makes him one of the best known people to have ever lived (see: http://pantheon.media.mit.edu/rankings/people/all/all/-4000/2010/H15).

In the case of my earlier genealogical example, the books of the New Testament go back and parallel the lineages of the Old Testament to draw a direct line from King David to Jesus spanning roughly a 1000 years. This is seemingly suspect for a man who would have most likely been an illiterate and poor carpenter, but certainly served the purposes of Greek, Jewish, and Aramaic writers of the time, particularly against the ruling patriarchy of Judea and Rome at the time.

A well known popular culture version of this appears in the title of the book and film Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince as well as a primary plot point in which Potter actively eschews a beaten up copy of a potions textbook, but to his pleasant surprise find a heavily annotated text that helps him significantly in his studies.

https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Severus_Snape%27s_copy_of_Advanced_Potion-Making

Google has accelerated this by using search to better link pieces of knowledge in the modern world, but scholars have been linking thoughts manually for centuries.

Other great examples include teaching and scientific progress. Owen Gingerich details annotations in all the extant copies of Copernicus in his text The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. There it seemed obvious that the moving state-of-the art of science and teaching was reflected in the annotations made by professors who handed those annotations down to students who also copied them into their textbooks.

In some sense this is a textual equivalent of the directors commentary tracks on DVDs from the 1990's in which one could watch films with overdubbed running commentary of the film's director (and often cast, producers, et al. as appropriate).

The first time I recall seeing such journalistic annotations was on the web in The Smoking Gun (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/) which generally annotated court documents that were the source of newsworthy tidbits—generally relating to celebrities or gossip pages.

Ann starts speaking here about her experience teach with Hypothesis in the classroom. Close this sidebar and click on the text to advance the video to this point (53:29). Ann speaks for about 4 minutes. Worth watching till the end.

Annotating my mention of annotating transcripts. Meta!

At this point in reading, I remember a story written by Cortázar: Continuity of the Parks. We slowly learn that the reader of the story is actually the protagonist. I am annotating about someone foreshadowing my own annotation method. "A trail of many items" could well be the many tabs open in my browser, for instance. Kind of seeing yourself in a mirror as you follow the description.

Continuity of the Parks. A one-page story downloadable here.

Great paper on orphaned annotations in H.

Wonderful to see thinking in this direction. I'm thinking many layers of annotations for different purposes--both human and machine readable.

Stories can also be told on top of the papers themselves in the form of annotations.

https://web.hypothes.is/quick-start-guide-for-students

Hypothesis.is allows for annotation of various pages of a website. On this homepage, I have highlighted all text links to the other pages I have annotated.

The formatting of e-books on Internet Archive does not allow hypothesis.is users to annotate the books’ text. In annotating Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht for the EN6009 Annotate-A-Thon, I have attached annotations to the text beneath the scanned images. Extracts and corresponding page numbers are placed at the beginning of each annotation, in order to properly contextualize my responses.

To answer this question, it may depend on what the outcome was. Did the students use this for personal gain? Did the students report the security flaw? How many times did this occur? This moral dilemma is not only taking place in school, but in the real world.

This is also ethos because she uses the word 'we' again to show us that there is more than one person working on this problem.

Emma wants you to trust her with this issue, so she is using words such as 'we' and 'make sure' to gain her audience's trust that she'll help this issue.

Like annotations-on-annotations-on-annotations, but less human-centric?

But why not mix them together the way the IndieWeb has done?! A few people are using the new W3C recommendation spec for Webmention along with fragmentions to send a version of comments/marginalia/annotations to sites that accept them and have the ability to display them!

A good example of this is Kartik Prabhu's website which does this somewhat like Medium does. One can write their response to a sub-section of his post on their own website, and using Webmention (yes, there's a WordPress plugin for that: https://wordpress.org/plugins/webmention/ ) send him the response. It then shows up on his site as a quote bubble next to the appropriate section which can then be opened and viewed by future readers. Example: https://kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia For those interested, he's opensourced the code to help accomplish this: https://github.com/kartikprabhu/marginalia

While annotation systems have the ability to overlay one's site, there's certainly room for serious abuse as a result. (See an example at https://indieweb.org/annotation#Criticism) It would be nice if annotation systems were required to use something like webmentions (or older trackback/pingbacks) to indicate that a site had been mentioned elsewhere, this way, even if the publisher wasn't responsible for the resulting comments, they would be aware of possible attacks on their work/site/page.

We learn by doing. (And annotations do work on the text version. Neat!)

Didn’t expect to find [h] embedded here. Problem is, it doesn’t allow for annotations of the actual content.

Kind of like our assignments for History of Rhetoric 2.

It's just a bunch of annotations.

contextual personal epistemology defined

subjective personal epistemology defined

absolute personal epistemology defined

annotation as "conversing with an author" even when the author is not actively responding to annotations, but when one's annotations are a conversation with the author through their work

maybe more than anything, annotation is an invitation to actively create knowledge for oneself

This is interesting, since the opening video for https://hypothes.is/ mentions the early web also - in this case, for its annotation features that were removed.

It seems to me that hypothes.is is even more powerful used on IPFS content identified by hash since that underlying content cannot change.

Thanks to both services I'm doing exactly this right now!

Compare this with the fragmention: http://boffosocko.com/about/website-philosophy-structure/#I+try+to+follow

EVIDENCE NOTEBOOK Encourage students to use a graphic organizer, such as supporting main idea notes, to set up their notebook for this lesson. Find more strategies in the online ELA handbook.

CAN YOU EXPLAIN IT?

mb-test-annotations

I would like to make an observation of the purpose of the second poster which says "Enlist". This image is propaganda most likely coming from the American side urging men to enlist for the world war 1. This image depicts a mother clutching her baby, both are submerged under water. This drowning was likely caused by the sinking of the leusitania, which was "a British passenger ship sailing off the coast of Ireland"(Keene 597). This ship was destroyed by a German U-boat who claimed that the ship was carrying explosives. This image, by Fred Spear, has a feeling of vengeance attached to it. The men that it intended to inspire will feel like they need to fight for the lost lives of the Americans that were on the Luisitania.

Regarding the next version of hypothes.is could use some annotation to show -sober-beard- https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#view used in relation to topic and file locations project starts etc. and stats maybe little icons, or highlighting with roll over gui change and stats view or links to code parts and interaction. https://packages.debian.org/stable/electronics/

Few types? It's like other applications such crocodoc or docs?

Love the work machines can do, but I think I will always value the connections that people, and individuals, establish among each other.

It's good to have so many comments (and please keep them coming), but they are not necessariy efficient to handle that way.

Many comments address multiple passages or elements of the draft, but where a mapping between comments and text passages is possible, I propose that we use annotations like https://hyp.is/AVQW11OTH9ZO4OKSlvBo/wiki.surfnet.nl/display/OSCFA/Amsterdam+Call+for+Action+on+Open+Science to do that mapping.

And searching the web in general; searching and finding the connections among content rather than searching just for content.

Providing context for the coalition (coming a bit over two weeks later).

Interesting initiatives for video annotations, especially in educational contexts.

Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes

Annotations are at the Web’s core.

Bookmarks are just a special case of annotations

Great feature set for annotation organization and text mining, with videos

Feature list of annotations, Diigo vs Delicious

Interesting crowdsourced thread on annotation-like services.

Might be of interest for API for social, annotations, or digipub in general.

Endorsement by HL Gates. Good idea to seek endorsements by well-known or respected people.

more ad stuff

Advertising tool

Need for editing tool integration or issue tracking workflow tags

Good use for "groups"

Common categories for tags

use case

Use case

Use case

Use Media Fragments on video