73 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2023
  2. Apr 2023
  3. Jan 2023
  4. Nov 2022
  5. Sep 2022
  6. Aug 2022
  7. Jul 2022
    1. For those curious about the idea of what students might do with the notes and annotations they're making in the margins of their texts using Hypothes.is, I would submit that Dan Allosso's OER handbook How to Make Notes and Write (Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022) may be a very useful place to turn. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/

      It provides some concrete advice on the topic of once you've highlighted and annotated various texts for a course, how might you then turn your new understanding, ideas, and extant thinking work into a blogpost, essay, term paper or thesis.

      For a similar, but alternative take, the book How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking by Sönke Ahrens (Create Space, 2017) may also be helpful as well. This text however requires purchase via Amazon and doesn't carry the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (by-nc-sa 4.0) license that Dr. Allosso's does.

      In addition to the online copy of the book, there's an annotatable .pdf copy available here: http://docdrop.org/pdf/How-to-Make-Notes-and-Write---Allosso-Dan-jzdq8.pdf/ though one can download .epub and .pdf copies directly from the Pressbooks site.

    1. As marginal note-taking it often is the basis for questions asked in class discussion or points made in a final paper.

      Jeremy Dean indicates that marginal notes are often "the basis for [...] points made in a final paper", but I wonder how frequently this is the case in the computer era? I rarely see or hear of educators encouraging the reuse of marginalia or even notes in academic settings, even within the framing of Hypothes.is which is an ideal tool for such a practice.

      It's been my experience that while notes are in margins, they tend to sit there lonely and unused. Few are actually creating content based on them. When this is the case, memory of the idea or issue at hand is necessary so that it may be looked up and transcribed back into a bigger piece. When it does happen it's also far more likely to be academic writers or researchers who are concertedly building up particular areas. It's much less likely to be high school or undergraduate college students who should have picked up the practice earlier in junior high school or even elementary school so that their school research years are easier.

      A potential resurgence of this broader practice may be coming back into vogue with the slew of new note taking apps that have been popping up and the idea of the zettelkasten coming back into a broader consciousness.

  8. Jun 2022
    1. The course Marginalia in Books from Christopher Ohge is just crying out to have an annotated syllabus.

      Wish I could follow along directly, but there's some excellent reference material hiding in the brief outline of the course.


      Perhaps a list of interesting people here too for speaking at https://iannotate.org/ 2022 hiding in here? A session on the history of annotation and marginalia could be cool there.

    2. Recommended preliminary reading  Antonini A., Benatti F., Blackburn-Daniels S. ‘On Links To Be: Exercises in Style #2’, 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (July 2020): 13–15. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372923.3404785   Grafton, Anthony. Worlds Made by Words : Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Harvard UP, 2011).  Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Yale UP, 2001).  –––. Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (Yale UP, 2005).  Ohge, Christopher and Steven Olsen-Smith. ‘Computation and Digital Text Analysis at Melville’s Marginalia Online’, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 20.2 (June 2018): 1–16.  O’Neill, Helen, Anne Welsh, David A. Smith, Glenn Roe, Melissa Terras, ‘Text mining Mill: Computationally detecting influence in the writings of John Stuart Mill from library records’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36.4 (December 2021): 1013–1029, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab010  Sherman, William. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (U of Pennsylvania P, 2008).  Spedding, Patrick and Paul Tankard. Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 

      An interesting list of readings on annotation.

      I'm curious if anyone has an open Zotero bibliography for this area? https://www.zotero.org/search/?p=2&q=annotation&type=group

      of which the following look interesting: - https://www.zotero.org/groups/2586310/annotation - https://www.zotero.org/groups/2423071/annotated - https://www.zotero.org/groups/2898045/social_annotation

      This reminds me to revisit Zocurelia as well: https://zocurelia.com

  9. May 2022
    1. I returned to another OER Learning Circle and wrote an ebook version of a Modern World History textbook. As I wrote this, I tested it out on my students. I taught them to use the annotation app, Hypothesis, and assigned them to highlight and comment on the chapters each week in preparation for class discussions. This had the dual benefits of engaging them with the content, and also indicating to me which parts of the text were working well and which needed improvement. Since I wasn't telling them what they had to highlight and respond to, I was able to see what elements caught students attention and interest. And possibly more important, I was able to "mind the gaps', and rework parts that were too confusing or too boring to get the attention I thought they deserved.

      This is an intriguing off-label use case for Hypothes.is which is within the realm of peer-review use cases.

      Dan is essentially using the idea of annotation as engagement within a textbook as a means of proactively improving it. He's mentioned it before in Hypothes.is Social (and Private) Annotation.

      Because one can actively see the gaps without readers necessarily being aware of their "review", this may be a far better method than asking for active reviews of materials.

      Reviewers are probably not as likely to actively mark sections they don't find engaging. Has anyone done research on this space for better improving texts? Certainly annotation provides a means for helping to do this.

    1. Writer and photographer Craig Mod wrote, “There is a gapingopportunity to consolidate our myriad marginalia* into an even morerobust commonplace book. One searchable, always accessible,easily shared and embedded amongst the digital text we consume.”6

      6 Craig Mod, “Post-Artifact Books and Publishing,” craigmod.com, June 2011, https://craigmod.com/journal/post_artifact/.

      It's not just me... I might hope that someone could leverage Hypothes.is' product to create a more explicit digital commonplace book out of their product.

  10. Apr 2022
    1. The bookitself participates in the history it recounts: it has a title page, table of contents,footnotes, a bibliography and an index to assist the reader, while the digitalcopy enables the reader to search for individual words and phrases as well asto copy-and-paste without disfiguring a material object.

      Some scholars study annotations as part of material culture. Are they leaving out too much by solely studying those physically left in the books about which they were made, or should we instead also be looking at other sources like commonplace books, notebooks, note cards, digital spaces like e-readers that allow annotation, social media where texts are discussed, or even digital marginalia in services like Hypothes.is or Perusall?

      Some of these forms of annotation allow a digital version of cut and paste which doesn't cause damage to the original text, which should be thought of as a good thing though it may separate the annotations from the original physical object.

    1. 3. Who are you annotating with? Learning usually needs a certain degree of protection, a safe space. Groups can provide that, but public space often less so. In Hypothes.is who are you annotating with? Everybody? Specific groups of learners? Just yourself and one or two others? All of that, depending on the text you’re annotating? How granular is your control over the sharing with groups, so that you can choose your level of learning safety?

      This is a great question and I ask it frequently with many different answers.

      I've not seen specific numbers, but I suspect that the majority of Hypothes.is users are annotating in small private groups/classes using their learning management system (LMS) integrations through their university. As a result, using it and hoping for a big social experience is going to be discouraging for most.

      Of course this doesn't mean that no one is out there. After all, here you are following my RSS feed of annotations and asking these questions!

      I'd say that 95+% or more of my annotations are ultimately for my own learning and ends. If others stumble upon them and find them interesting, then great! But I'm not really here for them.

      As more people have begun using Hypothes.is over the past few years I have slowly but surely run into people hiding in the margins of texts and quietly interacted with them and begun to know some of them. Often they're also on Twitter or have their own websites too which only adds to the social glue. It has been one of the slowest social media experiences I've ever had (even in comparison to old school blogging where discovery is much higher in general use). There has been a small uptick (anecdotally) in Hypothes.is use by some in the note taking application space (Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq, etc.), so I've seen some of them from time to time.

      I can only think of one time in the last five or so years in which I happened to be "in a text" and a total stranger was coincidentally reading and annotating at the same time. There have been a few times I've specifically been in a shared text with a small group annotating simultaneously. Other than this it's all been asynchronous experiences.

      There are a few people working at some of the social side of Hypothes.is if you're searching for it, though even their Hypothes.is presences may seem as sparse as your own at present @tonz.

      Some examples:

      @peterhagen Has built an alternate interface for the main Hypothes.is feed that adds some additional discovery dimensions you might find interesting. It highlights some frequent annotators and provide a more visual feed of what's happening on the public Hypothes.is timeline as well as data from HackerNews.

      @flancian maintains anagora.org, which is like a planet of wikis and related applications, where he keeps a list of annotations on Hypothes.is by members of the collective at https://anagora.org/latest

      @tomcritchlow has experimented with using Hypothes.is as a "traditional" comments section on his personal website.

      @remikalir has a nice little tool https://crowdlaaers.org/ for looking at documents with lots of annotations.

      Right now, I'm also in an Obsidian-based book club run by Dan Allosso in which some of us are actively annotating the two books using Hypothes.is and dovetailing some of this with activity in a shared Obsidian vault. see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/24/55803196/. While there is a small private group for our annotations a few of us are still annotating the books in public. Perhaps if I had a group of people who were heavily interested in keeping a group going on a regular basis, I might find the value in it, but until then public is better and I'm more likely to come across and see more of what's happening out there.

      I've got a collection of odd Hypothes.is related quirks, off label use cases, and experiments: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/ including a list of those I frequently follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

      Like good annotations and notes, you've got to put some work into finding the social portion what's happening in this fun little space. My best recommendation to find your "tribe" is to do some targeted tag searches in their search box to see who's annotating things in which you're interested.

    1. https://hypothes.is/a/krnfMl0pEeyvKGMTU02-Lw

      stuhlmueller Dec 14, 2021

      Elicit co-founder here - feel free to leave feedback through hypothesis, we're reading it. :)


      Example in the wild of a company using Hypothes.is to elicit (pun intended) feedback on their product.

    1. An initial stage of annotation might be provided bya professional reader hired to add aids to reading for the owner, including espe-cially mnemonic or meditative aids, or enhancements to the layout, but alsooccasionally self-reflexive or potentially dissenting observations.24 A successionof owner-readers could then add further corrections and comments.

      Stages of annotation in the medieval period


      When is Hypothes.is going to branch out into the business of professional readers to add aids to texts?! :)

      Link this to the professional summary industry that reads books and summarizes them for busy executives

      Link this to the annotations studied by Owen Gingerich in The Book Nobody Read.

  11. Mar 2022
    1. I've been using the Hypothesis Obsidian annotator to annotate PDFs in an Obsidian vault—so I have a bunch of annotations as markdown files. I am now attempting to publish the Obsidian vault as a website at movement-ontology.brandazzle.net, but the plugin apparently isn't supported on website, as the annotations do not render. Is there any way I could host the Hypothesis tools on the website and connect my annotations so that viewers can see my annotations?

      Brandon,

      Obsidian Annotator (https://github.com/elias-sundqvist/obsidian-annotator), which I'm presuming you're using, looks like it's working from within Obsidian instead of a web page and is very clever looking, but without some significant work, I don't think it's going to provide you with the results you're looking for. It sounds like you want an all-public chain of work and Obsidian Annotator currently defaults to an all-private chain.

      From my brief perusal of what's going on, the plugin appears to be tied to a single Hypothes.is account (likely the developer's) which defaults all annotations to private (only you) and as a result, even if you had the permalink to the annotations you'd not be able to see them presented on the web as they're all private and you wouldn't have access to the account. You could try filing some issues on the related Github repository to see if the developer might add the ability to make public annotations using your own personal account, which I'm sure would require your personal API key for Hypothes.is to be put into the settings page for the plugin in Obsidian. Another issue I see is that it's taking Hypothesis tags and turning them into Obsidian tags, which is generally fine, but the developer isn't accounting for multi-word tags which is creating unintended tag errors along the way that will need to be manually fixed.

      If you're open to an alternate method of annotating and doing so in public, I can recommend a workflow that will allow you to do what it sounds like you're attempting. It starts with annotating .pdf files (either on the web, or as local files in your browser) in public using your own Hypothes.is account. (Most of this also works with private annotations, but if you want them to appear on public versions of web-hosted .pdf files with the same fingerprints, you'll want them to be public so others can see/interact with them.) Next set up the Hypothesidian script described here: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225. There are some useful hints further down the thread on that page, so read the whole thing. The Github repository for it is here: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater/discussions/191 if you need it. I've documented a few modifications I've made to the built-in template to suit my particular needs and which might serve as a template if you find it useful: https://boffosocko.com/2021/07/08/hypothes-is-obsidian-hypothesidian-for-easier-note-taking-and-formatting/.

      You can then use the functionality of Hypothesidian to pull in the annotations you want (by day, by document, only your annotations, all the annotations on a document, etc.) For .pdf files, you may require Jon Udell's facet tool https://jonudell.info/h/facet/ to search your personal account for the name of the file or one of the tags you used. When you find it, you can click on it and it will open a new browser window that contains the appropriate urn file "key" you'll need to put into Hypothesidian to grab the annotations from a particular .pdf file. It will be in the general form: urn:x-pdf:1234abcd5678efgh9101112ijkl13. I haven't found an easier means of pulling out the URN/fingerprint of pdf files, though others may have ideas.

      When you pull in your annotations you can also get/find permalinks to the annotations on the web if you like. I usually hide mine in the footnotes of pages with the labels "annotation in situ" and "syndication links", a habit I've picked up from the IndieWeb community (https://indieweb.org/posts-elsewhere). You can see a sample of how this might be done at https://notes.boffosocko.com/where-are-the-empty-spaces-on-the-internet where I've been doing some small scale Hypothes.is/Obsidian/Web experiments. (I'm currently using Blot.im to get [[wikilinks]] to resolve.)

      Another strong option you're probably looking for is to use "via" links (https://web.hypothes.is/blog/meetvia/) on the URLs for your pdf files so that people can automatically see the annotation layer. (This may require whitelisting on Hypothes.is' end depending on where the files are hosted; alternately https://docdrop.org/ may be useful here.) Then if you've annotated those publicly, they'll also be able to see them that way too.

      Another side benefit of this method is that it doesn't require the Data View plugin for Obsidian to render your annotations within Obsidian which also means you'll have cleaner looking pages of annotations in your web published versions. (ie. none of the %% code blocks which don't render properly on the web)

      As I notice you're using some scanned .pdf files which often don't have proper OCR and can make creating annotations with appropriate Hypothes.is anchors, you might also appreciate the functionality of docdrop for this as well.

      Given your reliance on documents and the fact that you've annotated some in what looks like Adobe Acrobat or a similar .pdf program, you might additionally enjoy using Zotero with Obsidian, Zotfile, and mdnotes as outlined here: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/zotero-zotfile-mdnotes-obsidian-dataview-workflow/15536. It's relatively slick, but requires additional set up, reliance on more moving pieces, and isn't as nice an overall user interface in comparison to Hypothes.is. It also misses all of the potential useful social annotation you might get with Hypothes.is.

      Hopefully this is all reasonably clear and helpful. I'd be interested in hearing about options from others who are using Hypothes.is in conjunction with Obsidian or other related note taking tools and publishing them to the web after-the-fact.

      Best, Chris Aldrich

    1. Research shows that people who are asked to write on complex topics,instead of being allowed to talk and gesture about them, end up reasoning lessastutely and drawing fewer inferences.

      Should active reading, thinking, and annotating also include making gestures as a means of providing more clear reasoning, and drawing better inferences from one's material?

      Would gestural movements with a hand or physical writing be helpful in annotation over digital annotation using typing as an input? Is this related to the anecdotal evidence/research of handwriting being a better method of note taking over typing?

      Could products like Hypothes.is or Diigo benefit from the use of digital pens on screens as a means of improving learning over using a mouse and a keyboard to highlight and annotate?

    1. Nice to see someone speaking so joyously about annotations. :) Looks like you've got a heavier analog version of the digital version of what I'm doing. I often use Kindle hightlights/annotations and then import them to Obsidian. Alternately I use Hypothes.is on online .pdf copies and then use Hypothesidian (https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225) to import all my digital notes into Obsidian. I love being able to keep the original context of the text close for either creating literature notes or expanding fleeting notes into permanent ones. When I am in a more analog mode (who doesn't love the feel of a nice fountain pen on paper?) I have a method for doing optical character recognition on my handwritten notes to save the time of typing them out again: https://boffosocko.com/2021/12/20/55799844/

  12. Feb 2022
  13. Jan 2022
    1. You could imagine employers shipping corporate laptops with pre-installed notes to make it easier to transfer (previously tacit) knowledge and thus improve the onboarding process for new hires.

      Using Hypothes.is as an annotation layer for internal company notes in a private space could be an interesting way for easing on-boarding.

      In some sense, this is a little bit of what the annotated syllabus is doing for students at the beginning of a course (in addition to helping to onboard them to the idea of social annotation at the same time.)

  14. Nov 2021
  15. Sep 2021
    1. https://jrdingwall.ca/blogwall/25-years-of-ed-tech-blogs/

      JR writes about some of his journey into blogging.

      I appreciate some of the last part about the 9x9x25 blogs. For JR it seems like some smaller prompts got him into more regular writing.

      He mentions Stephen Downes regular workflow as well. I think mine is fairly similar to Stephen's. To some extent, I write much more on my own website now than I ever had before. This is because I post a lot more frequently to my own site, in part because it's just so easy to do. I'll bookmark things or post about what I've recently read or watched. My short commentary on some of these is just that, short commentary. But occasionally I discover, depending on the subject, that those short notes and bookmark posts will spring into something bigger or larger. Sometimes it's a handful of small posts over a few days or weeks that ultimately inspires the longer thing. The key seems to be to write something.

      Perhaps a snowball analogy will work. I take a tiny snowball and give it a proverbial roll. Sometimes it sits there and other times it rolls down the hill and turns into a much larger snowball. Other times I get a group of them and build a full snowman.

      Of course lately a lot of my writing starts, like this did, as an annotation (using Hypothes.is) to something I was reading. It then posts to my website with some context and we're off to the races.

    1. Jot down connections and tangential thoughts, underline key passages, and make a habit of building a dialogue with the author(s).

      Some people consider annotations to be a conversation with the author. But you're also having a conversation with yourself and your own thoughts. (Cross reference Niklas Luhmann's having a conversation with himself via his notes.)

      Further, there are platforms like Hypothes.is or social platforms like Twitter where you can move the conversation out of the page and engage with others. However, for this Hypothes.is has more power because it keeps the conversation linked to the original text and the original context (which I'll explicitly translate here as "with the text") to underline the point.

      cf:

      cum (Latin) : with

      textus (Latin) : tissue, web, texture, fabric, connection, language

      contextus (Latin) : context, connection, coherence, connexion, coherency, text

  16. Jul 2021
    1. Titi Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri SexWith a Translation and NotesVolume 1Edited by H. A. J. Munro Lucretius

      Testing out the OCR functionality of docdrop.org.

      I'm noticing that the pdf fingerprint of this text somehow matches that of other texts as there are a lot of non-related annotations on this page.

      Is docdrop doing something squirrelly with the fingerprint @dwhly?

  17. Jun 2021
    1. The fresh one, she told me afterward, felt a little lonely by comparison: she missed the meta-conversation running in the margins, the sense of another consciousness co-filtering D.F.W.’s words, the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes.

      There is definitely an art to writing interesting marginalia however. Perhaps something that requires practice?

      Sam Anderson's would be intriguing I'm sure. Dick Macksey's marvelous. Anderson provides the example of people wanting books from [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]] earlier in the piece.

      I can only contrast this with some of the crazy minutiae an pedantry I've seen on Hypothes.is which makes me think that it's surely an art form.

      I suspect some of it is that I'm missing the personal context with a particular person---a sense of continuity. Things get even worse when it's a piece annotated by a class which can create a cacophony of annotations. I see far too many "me too" annotations floating around in the margins that don't add anything to the conversation. (Hopefully I'm not guilty of this sin myself, but really, even my public annotations are a conversation between me and a piece and are only for my own benefit.)

    2. Now, when the Coleridge of 21st-century marginalia emerges, he should be able to mark up the books of a million friends at once.

      This could be an interesting service to set up and run.

      I wonder if I could set up a private Hypothes.is group and actually charge a club rate to members for doing such a thing?

    3. This gave me an epiphany — a grand vision of the future of social reading. I imagined a stack of transparent, margin-size plastic strips containing all of my notes from “Infinite Jest.” These, I thought, could be passed out to my friends, who would paste them into their own copies of the book and then, in turn, give me their marginalia strips, which I would paste into my copy, and we’d all have a big virtual orgy of never-ending literary communion.It was a hopelessly clunky idea: a vision right out of a Library Science seminar circa 1949.

      Goofy as this physical version sounds, I could imagine a digital overlay version that could go along with digital books in much the same way that Google Maps has digital overlays.

      The problem lies with registration and location of words to do the overlay properly. The UI would also be a major bear.

      Hypothes.is has really done a spectacular job in their version, the only issue is that it requires doing it all in a browser and isn't easily usable in any e-readers.

    1. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

      Computer and phone notifications can be insidious. I've personally turned most of them off.

      I also find that reading and annotating with Hypothes.is has helped me to have more focus while reading---even despite the short turnoffs to cogitate a bit, write a bit, and then return.

  18. Apr 2021
    1. Introduction

      This is a fun and curious bit of UI here relating to Hypothes.is. There's an icon/button with a link to open the via interface and it auto updates with each additional annotation.

      I'd like to look into how they implemented it and potentially add it as a social sort of feature to my own site.

    1. DM gives you simple but/and powerful tools to mark up, annotate and link your own networked collections of digital images and texts. Mark up your image and text documents with highlights that you can then annotate and link together. Identify discreet moments on images and texts with highlight tools including dots, lines, rectangles, circles, polygons, text tags, and multiple color options. Develop your projects and publications with an unlimited number of annotations on individual highlights and entire image and text documents. Highlights and entire documents can host an unlimited number of annotations, and annotations themselves can include additional layers of annotations. Once you've marked up your text and image documents with highlights and annotations, you can create links between individual highlights and entire documents, and your links are bi-directional, so you and other viewers can travel back and forth between highlights. Three kinds of tools, entire digital worlds of possible networks and connections.

      This looks like the sort of project that @judell @dwhly @remikalir and the Hypothes.is team may appreciate, if nothing else but for the user interface set up and interactions.

      I'll have to spin up a copy shortly to take a look under the hood.

  19. Mar 2021
    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Remi Kalir & Jeremy Dean</span> in Web Annotation as Conversation and Interruption (<time class='dt-published'>03/15/2021 00:21:05</time>)</cite></small>

  20. Feb 2021
    1. Private groups are also my solution to the potential "saturation" problem that many people have asked me about. I DO think that there's a potential disincentive to students who I've asked to annotate a document, if they open it and find hundreds of comments already there. I already face a situation when I post questions for discussion that people answer in a visible way, where some students say their peers have already made the point they were going to make. It's easier to address this objection, I think, when EVERY LINE of a document isn't already yellow!

      I've run into this issue myself in a few public instances. I look at my annotations as my own "conversation" with a document. Given this, I usually flip the switch to hide all the annotations on the page and annotate for myself. Afterwards I'll then turn the annotation view back on and see and potentially interact with others if I choose.

  21. Jan 2021
  22. Oct 2020
    1. But thirdly, and most valuably, the template gives you a big space at the bottom to write sentences that summarise the page.  That is, you start writing your critical response on the notes themselves.

      I do much this same thing, however, I'm typically doing it using Hypothes.is to annotate and highlight. These pieces go back to my own website where I can keep, categorize, and even later search them. If I like, I'll often do these sorts of summaries on related posts themselves (usually before I post them publicly if that's something I'm planning on doing for a particular piece.)

    1. If anyone is aware of people or groups working on the potential integration of the IndieWeb movement (webmentions) and web annotation/highlighting, please include them in the comments below–I’d really appreciate it.

      The IndieWebCamp.com site lists a small handful of people with Hypothes.is affiliations who had websites, but none of the seem to be active any longer. Perhaps we can track some of them down via twitter?

    1. 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.

    1. appreciate your help

      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.

    1. There’s also a robust ecosystem of tools to follow users, monitor site annotations etc.

      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?

    1. merely stops you from writing in the margins here on this website.

      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.

    1. The New York Times

      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!

    1. They both obviously point to the same specific page, and their beginnings are identical. The second one has a # followed by the words “I’m not looking” with some code for blank spaces and an apostrophe. Clicking on the fragmention URL will take you to the root page which then triggers a snippet of JavaScript on my site that causes the closest container with the text following the hash to be highlighted in a bright yellow color. The browser also automatically scrolls down to the location of the highlight.
    2. Create an IFTTT.com recipe to port your Hypothesis RSS feed into WordPress posts. Generally chose an “If RSS, then WordPress” setup and use the following data to build the recipe: Input feed: https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=username (change username to your user name) Optional title: {{EntryTitle}} Body: {{EntryContent}} from {{EntryUrl}} <br />{{EntryPublished}} Categories: Highlight (use whatever categories you prefer, but be aware they’ll apply to all your future posts from this feed) Tags: hypothes.is Post status (optional): I set mine to “Draft” so I have the option to keep it privately or to publish it publicly at a later date.

      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.

    1. Art by O’Hare and Bell highlight - both visually and conceptually - the dialogic quality of annotation expressing power.

      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.

    1. In April of 2019, at a digital learning conference, Manuel Espinoza spoke with educators, technologists, and annotation enthusiasts about R2L.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }1Nate Angell and “the role that Hypothesis plays in human rights work.”

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

    1. Interestingly, I’ve found that Kindle is useful in this respect. I buy Kindle versions of books that I need for work, and highlight passages and bookmark pages as I go. And when I’ve finished the software obligingly has a collection of all the passages I’ve highlighted.

      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/)

  23. Aug 2019
    1. Now you have the extension up and running.

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

  24. Nov 2016
    1. This is a picture of the first HTTP web server in the world. It was Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT computer at CERN. Pasted on the machine is an ominous sticker: "This machine is a server, do not power it down!!". The reason it couldn't be powered down is that web sites on other servers were starting to link to it. Once they linked to it, they then depended on that machine continuing to exist. If the machine was powered down, the links stopped working. If the machine failed or was no longer accessible at the same location, a far worse thing happened: the chain between sites becomes permanently broken, and the ability to access that content is lost forever. That sticker perfectly highlights the biggest problem with HTTP: it erodes.

      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!

  25. Mar 2016
    1. ELA teachers can have their students analyze the rhetorical strategies in that same debate using an application like Hypothes.is. Looking at this speech through the lens of two different perspectives can deepen students’ knowledge.
    1. and

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

  26. Feb 2016
    1. playful annotation in the open.
    2. This format [Hypothesis] is much better for me as far as encouraging participation. With the old discussion format that listed all the readings then posed questions for group discussion, I felt a bit overwhelmed by the long responses people offered and had a hard time jumping into the conversation. With Hypothes.is, I can offer my thoughts as I go, which I find to be much more effective in my assimilation of the information.
  27. Jan 2016