Annotation engenders literacy and encourages participation...

annotation using chrome on academia.edu

That's becoming a scarier and scarier statement, especially given Facebook's "internet" efforts in the developing world..

using chrome, this is an annotation on the hosted PDF

local annotation using hypothes.is in Firefox

Quite possibly true:

LOL

Love the mashup of old and new world sources in these epigraphs. Reminds me of Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk:

Pavement did always seem like old souls to me, like ancient philosophers born too late.

At this point in the riff, I was reminded of Allen Ginsberg's "America":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orar-V3y5Sk

This was true at Genius. An informal educational setting.

Check out...

And I was always more teacher than scholar at that.

When I was writing my dissertation on African American literature, I fantasized about my book having a Kehinde Wiley image on the cover. I just love the way he complicates black personhood by remixing urban images with the conventions of "classic" European portraiture.

This is not all that shocking if you think about it, but still a pretty incredible statement about the culture economy at this moment.

Wow. For all the coverage of the controversy of the black quarterback, I had never heard this before. Newsome should write a book.

xkcd on standards

Of course this is just a small, but important piece of the direction the web has taken. For an overview of these issues, see Ethan Zukerman's "The Internet's Original Sin."

I'm playing on the Domain of One's Own Movement here. DOOO started at University of Mary Washington when Jim Groom and Tim Owen's decided it would be cool (read: necessary) for students and faculty to have their own domains and thus more control over their online identity.

As usual, I was late on the scene here, but it was a 2016 New Year's resolution of mine to set up my own domain and so here you have it. Jim and Tim now run a start-up of sorts, Reclaim Hosting, helping folks like me get setup with their own domain.

Love this style of joke. Something about the way the mind starts a sentence and then realizes it's gone in the wrong direction.

Part of what the Domain of One's Own movement is all about is not so much having your own registered website, but in general taking more control over your online identity. I say most posts I've made on the Web aren't really my own because most posts have been made on Facebook and Twitter and in other places I have only a limited control over.

Part of what inspired me to finally register my own domain like this was a Gardner Campbell Tweet of a blog by OG blogger Dave Winer.

You probably already figured that out, but I gotta say, the hypothes.is plugin for WordPress is pretty sweet!

I humbly offer this annotated microblog in the grand tradition of short texts, heavily glossed.

See, for example, J.G. Ballard's story “Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown,” a single sentence elaborately footnoted, and Jacques Derrida's "“Living On / Border Lines," an essay with a running footnote alongside it addressed to the translator of the text.

The walled garden vs the wildflower?

Refers to 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift's famous--and oft taught--A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (1792).

It is indeed a classic example of "irony" in literature.

The next two stanzas cover the marginalia of school children, a familiar image to high school and college English students. This stanza covers less enthusiastic students, who seem to just copy down what their teachers say about certain passages.

This is the first of two specific marginalia that the speaker of the poem recalls in the poem, the later one encompassing the final two climactic stanzas.

These lines also establish the speaker as a thoughtful reader, pausing to reflect not only on the books he is reading, but their marginalia as well. But it should be noted that he himself does not write in the book.

Just about the time many of us read J.D. Sallinger's Catcher in the Rye.

For the eager to learn students described in this stanza, Collins uses an extended sports analogy for their marginalia. They are fans shouting support of the favorite teams/authors.

The analogy of course begs comparison between the relative audiences for the type of written works described in the poem and popular sports.

Here the removed interaction between the author and the reader/annotator is imagined metaphorically as a physical, somewhat brutal, one, the speaker reading such critiques as a physical threats.

Collins may be mocking marginalia here in the same way he mocks a certain kind of student's approach to poetry in "Introduction to Poetry":

But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope<br> and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose<br> to find out what it really means.

A lovely metaphor for memory: like a treasured piece of jewelry, one worn (as lockets often are) in memory of someone or something.

The poem climaxes with a description of a marginal note that the speaker remembers in a library book, and that he imagines was written by a beautiful girl. These final lines show the speaker imagining the note-writer leaving her message after becoming so enthralled with Holden Caulfield that she drops her sandwich on the book.

Both the original emotionally-wrought stain, and the speaker's emotional response to it, serve to demonstrate the power of reading, how deeply we can become engaged in the books we read. More broadly, marginalia is the perfect vehicle for that human relationship to literature.

William Blake took particular offense with Reynolds' Discourses on Art. The two had radically different views on the role of art, Blake believing that men were born with artistic knowledge while Reynolds arguing that such knowledge was only gained from experience.

Collins alludes to Blake's famously harsh annotations of Reynolds (see this article from the Andrew Graham-Dixon archive for more). On the title page of Discourses on Art, Blake wrote, “This Man was Hired to Depress Art.” Later he went further:

Having spent the vigour my Youth & Genius under the Oppression of Sr Joshua & his Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves Without Employment & as much as could possibly be Without Bread, The Reader must Expect to Read in all my Remarks on these Books Nothing but Indignation & Resentment. While Sr Joshua was rolling in Riches, Barry was Poor & Unemploy’d except by his own Energy; Mortimer was call’d a Madman, & only Portrait Painting applauded by the Rich & Great ... Fuseli, Indignant, almost hid himself. I am hid.

Before the 1440 invention of the printing press, books like the Gospel would have been painstakingly copied by hand.

Johannes Guttenberg, inventor of the press, is most famous for his definitive edition of the Bible--the copy below is at the NY Public library.

As the Lapham's Quarterly has blogged such marginalia ranged from the bizarre to the pornographic.

In this stanza, the poet includes a community of active readers in his ode to marginalia. These are active readers who engage the works under study with their own thoughts--just like the communities of hypothes.is! You are right now experiencing Marginalia 2.0!

It's true. This is a favorite theme of both high school and college English teachers. William Golding's Lord of the Flies would be a great book to note this theme in the margins.

The sidelines here a metaphor for the margin of the page and continue the sports analogy begun in the opening lines of the stanza.

So not page by page?

Doing this is one of my professional new year's resolutions for 2016.

I am more and more intrigued by this syndication model for social media...

https://indiewebcamp.com/POSSE

This is a badass hyperlink--it takes us to a 1996 reprinting of Adolph S. Ochs' original statement of principles when he took over the NYTimes in 1896.

It's a solid statement of principles, but citing here in the context of digital publishing--generally absent such principles?--say so much more than just that.

test

This also means that any pages you practice on and create an test annotation on will appear here. So, it's generally good practice to delete such annotations.

Also note that the eye icon simply toggles on and off highlights. If you'd rather look at the text free of annotation at any point, you can click the eye to hide highlights.

Note that on this page, highlights/annotations and the hypothes.is sidebar appear automatically. No extension is needed here, because we have embedded the app natively on this page.

There'a chance your teacher or professor may be cool enough to have done this as well, in which case you can skip this step. But one day, this is how the entire Web will look!

Some background context from Wikipedia on the subtext of this tutorial.

That's right, this page is annotated!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBG6agP2gKk

The what? We know it sounds super jargony, but it's actually super easy. Jut add "via.hypothes.is" to any URL/web address and "Presto!" it opens with hypothes.is activated!!

Here's a link where you can just paste a URL/web address and annotate it via "via":

https://via.hypothes.is/

Pretty neat site if you haven't been there. You can read and write annotations on all kinds of song lyrics. Here for example are the annotated lyrics to "Hello" by Adele.

This may be little strange to some. We're used to going to web pages to do things online. Hypothes.is though is a tool that you bring with you to other websites.

It's an Icelandic URL. Neat, huh?

You should definitely buy the domains for any neat word/phrases mixes you can make with country URLs...

Really for anything. Come on, it's so cool. You can't view this Arcade Fire video without it!

Thought this was a reference to the Whitman poem, "O Pioneers," but upon rereading it, the phrase does not appear there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnNblizjuEk

I think I made the mistake because of the Levi's "Go Forth" ad campaign, which used the Whitman poem.

test w/in zotero

test 2 w/in zotero

One aspect of tequity that I think is missing here is thinking about equity in terms of infrastructure and ecosystem. We can evaluate apps on the basis of how effective they are in the classroom--and that's a valuable exercise--but are apps the way to go in general? Should we be using the open Web more in our classrooms? If we do go with that great app, is it syncing with other tools we use in the classroom in ways that best serve students not only in the particular activity but as learners throughout their school days and beyond?

How would one do this effectively through h?

really?

I.e. annotation.

h desperately needs this. We should hire a contract to build it over the next 6 months.

Key edu feature: special accounts for students.

Annotation as the key.

So tagging is the key feature?

Can page level tags and annotation level tags really be handled the same way (as in h)?...

But now they generally can be synced as in Chrome.

meh

Hypothes.is needs built-in social bookmarking tools.

Pretty dated as far as innovation in tech/ed-tech.

So not primarily an annotation tool.

But what is h doing to help users organize their resources? Or is h simply not a social bookmarking tool?

Again there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about what happened here that further reporting or thinking through might have corrected. It wasn’t likely any editorial intention at work, or at least that’s just the beginning of the problem—"revamping" is thus too simple a verb and one that elides the original transcription of the text to digital form at UVA and its then its further digital dissemination through copying to other sites like Genius.

A broader point is missed as well: unlike in traditional print culture, the mistake here could have (and has) been easily corrected in the online text at Genius (not to mention historicized in annotation). This type of critical engagement from Internet users is what Genius and other Web 2.0 platforms are predicated upon. Indeed, if digital citizens continue to passively point to the mistakes online (like the mistakes of this article itself) the Internet will be an impoverished place for information and understanding.

This is starting to sound like an Andy Rooney rant from 60 Minutes: “This darn Internet is always lying to me, why when I was a boy our books had spines and smelled like fall.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7LqsAnhrR4

The very grammar of this sentence belies a basic misconception of the Internet and especially the (Rap) Genius project. Rap Genius should not be the active agent here and not only because they have since changed our name. Genius provides a platform for crowd-sourced discussion and explanation of texts, so the annotations on this Faulkner story are done by users not employees of the site.

I'm copying and pasting the image of an annotation and reply from Genius--where I first annotated this blog:

The tone of this article from beginning to end drips with technophobia–surprising for the “Bits” blog. The author seems to start with the presumption that Internet networks of knowledge are inferior to such “estimable” and traditional sources of information and authority such as print publishing and knowledge production.

In fact the bowdlerization likely began with this text at a widely respected University of Virginia site. To put a finer point on it, the error began in a source that the the author would likely believe is trustworthy: the academy.

There’s no doubt that the Internet and Genius especially are complicated knowledge ecosystems that require new literacies of citizens, but to simply throw up one’s hands and say “Look I found a mistake online” doesn’t even begin to engage that new frontier of knowledge creation.

As if any text, especially academic anthologies, etc., isn't itself the construction of particular socio-political circumstances.

Here's an example of this argument, partially deconstructed through annotation.

What an odd point given the acknowledgement of the power of digital archives above? Isn't Homer easier to access--both physically and intellectually--today than ever before?

Isn't it rather hyper-activated? Abetted both by robust search mechanisms as well as utility for whimsy?

Isn't "browsing" literally THE major activity of online inquiry/reading?

This recent nautil.us article serves as an interesting counterpoint to the current piece.

The fallacy here is that computers are too blame. We simply need to cultivate better online reading practices.

I'm admittedly bias here, but can't believe collaborative annotation is not included here. IMO it's really Goodreads 3.0.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGPYBb2DRsg

I love and want to believe this idea as a fellow humanist, but it's really an unsubstantiated claim.

They're so linear, not really good for making intratextual connections.

This is so key and is why hypothes.is is just as much a client--that you can, as Adam has demonstrated elegantly integrate into your blog--as an advocacy group for open annotation. We want annotation to be part of the everyday experience of using the Web, but that doesn't necessarily mean using h. As long as a variety of annotation clients are built according to open protocols then users will have options and, best of all, their content will theirs for keeps.

I worked with sci-fi author Jeff Vandermeer to run such an experiment with annotation on an excerpt of his novel Acceptance using Genius.

This is so interesting. I'm reminded of studies that say similar things about students reading Shakespeare and how contemporary readers have to reorder his syntax to make sense of the writing. (More here from The Big Thing.)

Hypertext as close reading! Love it.

Maria Konnikova also cites a 2014 study in a New Yorker article on this topic that concludes by offering annotation as a kind of deliberate, slow online reading practice. (Note: the article has been annotated by two sets of college students!)

Very interesting. So an intentional online reading practice--fortified, let's say, by a collaborative annotation tool--might produce different results...

So important to break down that analog-digital binary. It's much more of a continuum.

I'm reminded of this line from a recent Gardner Campbell essay:

Go into your nearest college or university library. Ignore the computer stations and the digital affordances. Enter the stacks, and run your fingers along the spines of the books on the shelves. You're tracing nodes and connections. You're touching networked learning—slow-motion and erratic, to be sure, but solid and present and, truth to tell, thrilling.

This is, in the end, a very persuasive argument from science.

Love this article, but this is such a lame sentence. If a student wrote it, I'd cross it out.

Love this line!

Clive Thompson's Smarter Than You Think offers a nice opposition to Carr's argument. For Thompson, it's less about man versus machine, with one or the other overtaking its counterpart. It's about the working togetherness of it all. A robot chess player, for example, is not better than a machine and human woking together, the human leveraging computational power, not succumbing to it.

This really is a wonderful analog analog to the Internet. One might even juxtapose it to that other proto-Internet machine, the Memex:

Never seen this before. What a great idea for designers to share their work! New Yorker and New York Times should do this.

Folks, like Molly Ball of The Atlantic had fun with this one on Twitter:

You can watch the video of the speech below or here in this annotation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvlm3LKSlpU

It might seem odd to celebrate a candidate's lack of experience for a job--it would stand to reason that a experienced politician would be a good choice for the next president--Palin here plays on the rhetoric that Washington/the political system is "broken" and needs someone from outside it's corrupt influences to fix it.

One of Palin's signature lines:

The NYTimes's Michael Barbaro described this as "This is perhaps the most accurate statement in her speech."

So America is great but also needs to be made great again? It mystifies me that the whole rhetoric around the lost greatness of the country doesn't get labeled anti-American.

Zotero Firefox test...

test on Zotero group PDF

Here's a trailer for the Al Pacino version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdbzRtxVtns

Agree with everything here. But it also seems to me--and perhaps this is what is meant by "accessible"--that over the long haul, open is not just right, it's better. That is to say, especially from the standpoint of knowledge production (whether scholarly or pedagogical) we need open source tools/solutions to ensure the best knowledge infrastructure over time. In short, we need something besides Google.

Why not hypothes.is?

This seems the central concern of these TOS ratings--outside of sharing user data.

Genius says the same thing. Basically you don't control the content you create.

Zotero test--opened this PDF from Zotero online, opened in new window

This is an odd choice of text on a celebratory day like today, but I think it's a valuable use for a tool like hypothes.is.

THIS IS A FAKE MLK SITE.

*But it's housed at a very legitimate URL,*

a lesson if there ever was one in how we (and our students) but be vigilant critical readers of Internet information.

It'd be an interesting exercise to expose the misinformation and hate tactics/rhetoric of the site through annotation...

Pretty subversive use of the term neuter--not usually deployed for empowerment.

Wow, people have been griping about youtube comments for a while now.

wrings collar

Interesting...he eventually annotated on Genius.

I like this simple explanation.

Neat. This is all very Vannevar Bushian (?).

Or a technology AND a philosophy?

Hmmm...

web

TED talk.

definition of internet

I feel like what's missing--and it's emphasized more above--is the mechanical knowledge of networked learning. It's power is recognized and leveraged, but it's not fully understood in its infrastructure.

I bet they can SnapChat like pros, though!

What a beautiful and evocative series of sentences!

Originally intended as upholding the virtues of the humanities in opposition to science and technology, I'd like to co-opt the argument for the humanities within, mainly, technology. We need more humanists in tech!

I like this phrase.

Nicely put.

But wouldn't it be great if everyone owned their own domain?

I've always thought of the idea of scale, perhaps naively, as about access. It's a cynical, but not completely incorrect, take on MOOCs, to say that their advocates don't intend scale to mean democratic reach of education content.

An image of Alice Paul appeared next to the video feed on wh.gov when Obama spoke these lines:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Paul

He really address the room here. I don't remember such a direct, sincere address of the house/senate as this in my SOTU listening.

He really address the room here. I don't remember such a direct, sincere address of the house/senate as this in my SOTU listening.

He actually added the lines "more perfect union" here live. He of course gave a famous campaign speech in 2008 centered around those lines.

Infographics next to video on wh.gov are pretty cool. Visually rhetorically support Obama's points.

So refreshing to hear a thoughtful person speak about these issues.

Seems a jab at Trumps's "Make America Great Again."

Stakes are low.

A reference to Net Neutrality. But is it open enough? Or how exactly is the word "open" being used here?

Woot!

Food stamps recipients (welfare mothers, etc) have long been a touchpoint in American politics.

As Obama noted live in an aside, this is not an applause line, but it got a few claps from someone who I'm guessing does not agree with so -called Obama Care and is proud of it. LOL.

Students and teachers! We're annotating the State of the Union live and in the days that follow here at this link. Join the conversation at any point!

No pressure. Really, this is just a conversation. Respond as you might if you were watching the speech in class. You can ask questions, make comments, and reply to those of others. Feel free to get historical, political, even humorous--you can add GIFs!

So conversational! I feel like he's in my living room!!

Ha!

Good analogy.

Original use of phrase?

Nice line.

"personal cyberinfrastructure"

Origin of the Domain of One's Own?

LMS vs HTML?

This of course was not just true on college campuses.

Key principles for hypothes.is as well.

Great point. Which is mode insidious?

"Vendor-independent": hypothes.is as client but also as advocacy group.

What does this coalition look like within education/annotation.

I'm guessing this didn't happen...

Another great line about the importance of open standards.

Vendors? Included in the conversation?...

Helpful analogy for thinking about importance of open standards/interoperability.

Open standards written into recommendations.

Comp the MOOC movement's extension of college "access."

The drive for data overrides this messiness. It makes sense, and a certain kind of commercialized sense, of everything.

machine as tractable/human as intractable

Very interesting 1965 statement in legislation that created the NEH. Oppositional to technology.

Interesting...

KEY!

Interoperability as sustainability versus "the right thing" in some higher moral sense. It is, f course, but it's also pragmatic.

It's not a given that it will benefit all...

Rap Genius as a piece of humanities cyberinfrastrcuture....

Role of the humanities in the development of cyberinfrastrcuture.

and Tweet this...

This is annotation!

And Medium does this already.

Not in Oneshot...

Also a pedagogical choice.

Searchability is also better for knowledge production though...

I love this line so much!

Is the crisis evoked here necessary?

We should be better connected to the former. Easier, more elegant Tweeting from h.

And, more importantly, we need to be bookmarking plus annotation. Death to Diigo.

This is pretty interesting and all very vague. Why couldn't the crowd-sourced version of the lyrics be included? If it is then this product isn't all that different from lots of other media productions, though it is cool that it's inside Spotify.

So interesting to think of Twitter, etc. as annotation platforms. Twitter just announced they are going beyond 140 characters and adding the ability to screenshot text.

share publicly

A rhetorical question to which the answer is clearly "No!" But phrasing it as a question forces the audience to momentarily consider the truth of the statement and thus more emphatically agree with Obama's alternative statement that follows.

A rhetorical question to which the answer is clearly "No!" But phrasing it as a question forces the audience to momentarily consider the truth of the statement and thus more emphatically agree with Obama's alternative statement that follows.