Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well?
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.
It’s now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next 15 years, and for decades to come.
This line really drew me into the speech, making me feel like I was part of the decision.
our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999.
Politifact rated this claim "Mostly True.", though those that disagree with Obama would likely argue that this single statistic does not tell the whole story of the nation's economy.
15 years that dawned with terror touching our shores;
A reference to September 11, 2001, when Al-Queda terrorists flew two hi-jacked commercial planes into the World Trade Center Buildings in New York City.
It’s now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next 15 years and for decades to come.
This line really drew me into the speech, making me feel like I was part of the decision.
our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999.
Politifact rated this claim "Mostly True.", though those that disagree with Obama would likely argue that this single statistic does not tell the whole story of the nation's economy.
Incredible that the "screenshort" hack is now getting integrated into Twitter itself. But it's still not web annotation!
instructively
Hi, Jenny!
The outbound piece depends on Tantek Çelik‘s “POSSE,” which stands for “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Getting the comments, likes, favorites and other responses back depends on Ryan Barrett‘s Bridgy.
I find this helpful in thinking about the future of hypothes.is.
Simple: We’re in danger of losing what’s made the Internet the most important medium in history – a decentralized platform where the people at the edges of the networks – that would be you and me – don’t need permission to communicate, create and innovate.
Right on!
Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask?
This is really the question that Obama was answering with this speech. It was the focus of the campaign at the time.
National Constitution Center
The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is across the street from Independence Hall where both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were signed.
The choice of location is obviously deeply symbolic, linking Obama’s presidential bid with the founding moment of US history. A black president would go a long way to “finishing” the “improbable experiment” in equality begun by the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
the spring of 1787.
What happened at this time in US history?
In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies,
While true at the time, the flag was removed in June 2015 after a racially-motivated mass shooting that took place in the capital.
March 18, 2008
This now famous speech was originally delivered during Obama's campaign for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination. While it was given in response to criticism over his association with the controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright, the speech more broadly serves to locate his historic campaign within the arc of US history.
Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States
Clearly, this is a remarkable statement in it's anti-Muslimness, but it's also deeply anti-American, especially for a "candidate"--I don't even like dignifying him with that word--whose primary slogan is "Make American great again!"
Blatant bigotry aside--just for sake of argument--"freedom of religion" is one of the basic rights guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one
Interoperability?
When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation.
Ownership of data/content. My annotations are mine.
Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item.
So, yeah, he's talking about hyperlinks and annotations as two separate aspects of the memex.
There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.
What's missing here is the power of peer to peer sharing of such scaffolding. It doesn't need to be only "master to disciple."
He can add marginal notes and comments
Boom!
A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
Really does sound like the networked PC.
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.
Is this the point at which the kind of annotation imagined by Bush becomes social? Where one person's trail of associations becomes useful to another?
What has become distinctive now is the extreme rapidity of searching one’s own marginalia,
This emphasizes the importance of "My Annotations" as a navigable and searchable space. Currently it is just infinite scroll. @judell
To my mind, another major difference is the multimedianess enabled by web writing.
each of these three abilities are still fundamental to the way we interact online with text, images, sound, and video. They can also be invaluable aspects of web writing for the liberal arts.
Both inside and outside of school.
The importance of collaboration is incorporated into Mellon’s initiative. In an added twist, the foundation required the university presses interested in the program to find a partner -- such as a research library, a museum or an organization already involved in providing digital publishing services -- before applying.
But what about collaboration between the presses and partners? So many of the projects overlap and might create siloed efforts in the long run if not working together/sharing their work to the fullest.
pre- and post-publication peer review;
duh
the interaction of the publication on the Web with primary sources and other related materials
enriched text--from composition to publicaiton
editing
improved collaborative workflow
The foundation’s proposed solution is for groups of university presses to work together on testing new business models for publishing digital works, or tackle any of the moving parts that task is comprised of, including
Much of this could be addressed by annotation...
Nina Wasserman
test
Journal editors who want to save time on needless formatting and copy editing should be able to provide their authors with a formatting template which takes care of the typesetting minutia.
Is this happening?
At the very least, your files will always remain comprehensible to you, even if the editor you are currently using stops working or “goes out of business.”
The MySpace/Friendster phenomenon.
difficult to search, to print, and to convert into other file
So this is kind of the same problem as having your photos locked into Facebook et al.
what you see is not what you get.
Clever reversal of the claim that these interfaces are WYSIWYG.
many authors base their practice on proprietary tools and formats that sometimes fall short of even the most basic requirements of scholarly writing.
So the issue is both with the proprietary nature of the tools (and the concomitant vicissitudes) and the simple pragmatism of the tool for the job.
To jump-start interest in the annotation program, arXiv has been converting mentions of its articles in external blog posts (called trackbacks) into annotations that are visible on an article's abstract page when using Hypothes.is.
I'm not sure I understand what's so great about this. Isn't this info relatively easy to reproduce. And wouldn't it be better displayed as a list in a sidebar rather than as annotations?
create their own annotation reader or writer — just as anyone can create their own web browser using standards-based technology.
This is the key analogy.
However, annotations are visible only to users on those sites. Other annotation services, such as A.nnotate or Google Docs, require users to upload documents to cloud-computing servers to make shared annotations and comments on them.
Various silos in other words.
not clear that researchers — who have proved reluctant in repeated trials to comment on published articles — will take to annotation, even if they can share their comments privately.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick has recently addressed this issue, suggesting implicitly that scholarly societies can mobilize their extant communities in this regard.
support for additional end-user scholarly communication tools such as annotation services
Recent Mellon Grants –building capabilities:◦Expand existing distribution business into publishing services platform (UNC Press)◦Portal for art & architectural history content (Yale U Press)◦Peer review for born-digital content (Stanford U Press)◦Open access digital monographs (U California Press)◦Mixed-media digital publishing platform (WVU)◦Manage Monographic Source Materials (U Michigan Press)◦Iterative Monographs Platoform(U Minnesota Press)◦Networked Monographs Infrastructure (NYU Press)
Mellon press grantees
He and his colleagues are keenly interested in the ability to annotate scholarship online, he says; Mellon has made serious investments in annotation tools and the development of open annotation standards by the university community and projects like Hypothes.is, which just received a two-year, $752,000 grant from the foundation to look into digital annotation in humanities and social-science scholarship.
Boom
a major report on cyberinfrastructure, "Our Cultural Commonwealth," underwritten by Mellon and published in 2006, was used by the NEH "as a blueprint" in forming its Office of Digital Humanities, says Brett Bobley, the director of that office.
Must read.
Although it defends the persistent value of the humanities, Mellon also champions the idea that they must change with the times.
including the papers of the Founding Fathers,
We should partner with these guys.
the foundation is widely admired for using its money and clout to reinforce the idea that, in an age of "disruption" and the veneration of science and technology, "the humanities and the arts are central to any life that one should want to live," as Mellon’s then-president, Don M. Randel, wrote in his 2012 annual report.
in turn
Other way around? Shouldn't this phrase just be cut.
“We’re developing a social network that is specifically around close-reading texts,” said Jeremy Dean of Rap Genius.
Okay line.
“I’m a Ph.D. in English,” Mr. Dean said. “I just started working here a month ago. I don’t have a great answer to that.”
Great line.
Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.
I can't personally make the argument, but I don't think it would be hard to argue that in more than one way, through more than one initiative, Google has NOT held up this promise from this IPO letter.
Our search results are the best we know how to produce.
Is this really true?
the goal is to seek knowledge and experience wherever it is vested and most easily accessed. Where does the knowledge and experience of literature occur? It occurs distributed through combinations of authors, documents, readers, and scholar-critics—that is, in the social networks of all the above.
Great quote.
A successful online reading environment would integrate social networking tools in a way that extends readers’ existing strategies.”
Annotation=boom!
make central the social environment of literature.
This is really what drew me into collaborative annotation. It's what I loved most about English class and grad school. More so than the research and writing--outside of the social.
coffee house model of public reading and debate
Scholarship, equipped with Web 2.0, becomes a fully social act.
Nice line.
conversation” (432).31
Thumbs up emoji!
‘review of the reviews’ (with reviewers weighing in on the issues raised by others),
Breaking down hierarchies...
brings in more voices
Expanding participation...
forming communities of discourse around discrete zones of text.
In other words, conversations.
socially computed reading may even experimentally deform literature to discover new truths about the significance of literature.
Hmmm...
After setting up pseudonymous Facebook accounts for twenty-one characters in the play
Don't think you can do this anymore.
Consider, to start with, the way that social-computing technologies are beginning to be used to experience—that is, to read, perform, and communicate (overlapping with “analyze” and “interpret”)—primary literature.
Yes! Might we include collaborative digital annotation here?...
Figure 6. Post of 4 September 2007 from Robin Hunicke’s blog Gewgaw. The full, scrollable length of this post, including the sidebar, is here split in two for static display.
Seems like one could find a better example of a web page who central text is superceeded by paratext.
by adding what can be generalized as a margin
Love this incredibly clever play on margins. I will leverage/extend this in my own work:
writings or marginalized peoples
writings in the literal margins of texts
Or consider such recent historians of the book as Ann Blair and William Sherman, who study annotation practices—for example, notes scribbled in the margins of a manuscript or book—to witness a whole zone of literary activity that is undecidably readerly and writerly.
Study of annotators.
readers inevitably make their own meanings.
This is why I find the "Annotation" article in this same volume--focused as it is on expert explanatory comments rather than readerly, discursive ones--so conservative. It really just reinforces the core circuit of literary meaning making, the "lite" version of literary sociality, as Liu might put it.
Meanwhile, in almost exactly the same decades that the Internet arose and eventually evolved social computing, literary scholarship followed similar principles of decentralization to evolve cultural criticism.7
Wow. This is the most interesting statement that I've read in a while. Wish I could pin an annotation...
Really helps me justify my career arc, turning from literary criticism as a career to software "development."
online commerce sites wanted customers to write in credit card numbers, mailing addresses, product reviews, and so on.
So the active readership of web 2.0 is directly linked to the consumerism of the commercial web?...
I'm so interested in the implications here: the democratization of the web, the breakdown of author/reader, producer/consumer (of knowledge), is rooted in capitalism?
author now really did require technical assistance,
Web 1.5 changes authorship only slightly from print model
so readers used their version of Web forms
Web 1.5 changed readership radically
not just generally to ICT (information and communication technologies) but specifically to social-computing technologies
And to literature itself!
the contemporary form of the human need to say something well (memorably, persuasively, movingly, beautifully, wittily, and so on) to someone else.
Does level of deliberation (or craft), say between a novel and a Tweet, matter here?
traditional narrative time line vanishes
I'm interested in hypertext (and annotation) before this point, before fully rupturing the narrative, but somehow co-existing with it...
Of course, through print's long history, there have been countless strategies to counter the line's power, from marginalia and footnotes
Interesting to think of annotation and hypertext in a lineage of digital technologies that disrupt (sorry) the linearity of text.
Marginalia — with its social thrill of shared immersion — is what the culture is moving toward, not away from. We are living increasingly in a culture of response. Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions.
Social media/Twitter as annotation
You could even “subscribe” to your favorite critic’s marginalia
Genius has this.
the ability to import not just your friends’ notes but notes from all of history’s most interesting book markers.
friends v famous readers
public note sharing for the Kindle — Coleridgean fantasy software that will make your friends’ notes appear (if you want them to) directly on your own books.
Not exactly how it has played out in the Kindle I don't think.
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.
Sounds about right.
What I really want is someone rolling around in the text. I want noticing.
Desire for social reading...
might end up serving equally well as a bridge between online and literary culture, between focus and distraction:
Konnikova argues so much more recently in the New Yorker.
Yet books are curious objects: their strength is to be both intensely private and intensely social — and marginalia is a natural bridge between these two states.
books as social or private
Old-school marginalia was — to put it into contemporary cultural terms — a kind of slow-motion, long-form Twitter, or a statusless, meaning-soaked Facebook, or an analog, object-based G-chat.
Great line.
According to the marginalia scholar H. J. Jackson, the golden age of marginalia lasted from roughly 1700 to 1820. The practice, back then, was surprisingly social
Annotation always already social.
recent wave of public teeth-gnashing about the future of marginal notes.
Citation?
Texts that really grabbed me got full-blown essays (sideways, upside-down, diagonal) in the margins.
The potential for digital marginalia to literally be essay-like.
a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane.
Precisely: annotation as active reading. But also as discourse with text/author.
marking up books, I’m pretty sure, is one of the Seven Undying Cornerstones of Highly Effective College Studying.
LOL.
The author argued that you didn’t truly own a book (spiritually, intellectually) until you had marked it up.
I definitely feel the same way, both as a scholar and a teacher (in terms of forcing the same principle on my students). And I'd go farther to expand the definition of ownership here to include comprehension and critical engagement.
It is not possible to "capture" your notes and highlights, to organize, compile, arrange, or to print them out. Until there is a seamless way to do this, marginalia will remain sequestered in the margins, and the promise of electronic books will be unrealized"
Got you there, JD.
One of the great things about the new Web is that you can manipulate text, but the iPad treats you like a child.
we should carry the annotations to the readers, to whatever version of the text (print, online) they happen to have in front of them. Ideas of how to do so are currently being developed.
At hypothes.is, for example, through our research on and development of a mechanism for document equivalency.
As Wido van Peursen has pointed out, “In the digital age, annotation is a completely new field, which includes not only traditional scholarly commentary, but also social tagging, blog comments, and comments solicited via specialised software” (20).
Ok, definitely have to read this guy--second reference that evoked an "amen" here--though he actually cites Zafrin here...
textual comprehension that is transhistorical, transcultural, and transgeneric.
Why should it? Isn't supporting the intense and intimate locatedness of various a reading communities one of the most powerful aspects of annotating digital text?
textual comprehension and “reading literacy” as a key competence.18
Not really elaborated on here or in the note, but curious about this statement in relation to debates around the Common Core in US public education...
The Text and Its Communicative Context
Some of my biggest issues with this article crystalize in this section.
Comprehension does not mean the passive perusal of a text but rather the appropriation of that text in the readerly practice—for instance, when readers link the text to their personal experiences or situations in life. Because annotation usually provides readers with an interpretation not of a complete text but of its particular aspects, the active participation of readers is enhanced.
Meh. What about letting students annotate the text themselves with such responses? Might scholarly annotation even silence such responses rather than occasion them?
Literary texts, which are not usually pragmatic in any specified sense, are so positioned through annotation.
Through the given definition of annotation, yes. But this is part of what I think is unfortunate about this model: it's too utilitarian in its approach to the literary text, not to mention the student reader.
The focus is wholly on comprehension rather than conversation or experience. As such it is product rather than process oriented. The text/reader/community as they emerge in the act of reading is what is most interesting (IMHO) about collaborative annotation.
ongoing working platform.
If we are to restrict our notion of annotation to the explanatory, this potential for dynamism on the part of the text/reader/scholar is perhaps the most valuable addition of digital annotation to traditional practice.
To address situational needs, we have arranged annotations on three levels: brief information (a survey, pointers); more detailed information, including facts and figures; and scholarly context (ideas for future research, indications of debates).
Would be interesting to test these multilevel categories in our first attempts at controlled tagging.
What is at stake is to find a definition of annotation in its explanatory sense and its relation to interpretation (see the definition of annotation vs. discursive comment in Zafrin 209; Zons).
Again, I think the discursive mode of annotation is far more interesting to think about. Not sure why this distinction is made here...
All too often, textual notes are nothing but “the enrichment of a text by information that is in the head of the human researcher” (Peursen 12).
Yes! Enough of scholarly commentary, at least as traditionally imagined. What of citizen-scholarly commentary, what of questions, comments, less expertly formed?
I think Sam Anderson best captures this idea of annotation in an NYTimes Magazine "riff": "What I really want is someone rolling around in the text."
Such integration allows for a creative and individual annotation that is productive for a reader
By whom?!
how to balance the notion of an open and readerly text (as emphasized by Spiro [24]; see also Gervais; Klemm; and Vandendorpe) with hermeneutical principles
?
since we get instant feedback from our readers about the text and explanatory notes
So students are NOT annotating themselves?
Different texts and readers need different annotations and different kinds of annotation, and the digital medium can meet those needs more easily than the print medium.11
Amen.
annotations serve to transmit knowledge and understanding about texts and their content.
"Transmitting" knowledge or exploring knowledge?
What kinds of styles or genres require explanation?
Certainly some texts/genres lend themselves to annotation/are easier to annotate. But, again, hasn't contemporary cultural criticism argued that really any text might be read closely in different kinds of ways?
how readerly comprehension of texts may be enhanced
The focus on "enhancement" is a common fantasy of technology. It is consistent with fantasies of surveillance that emphasize the pervasiveness or depths of vision...
...I'm wondering what it would mean to replace the emphasis on "enhancement" with the idea of "engagement."
New forms of collaboration made possible by the digital medium sharpen the theoretical question of how explanatory authority is established.
This is really the most interesting aspect of annotation and the digital humanities (to me at least). And it's not really addressed here. The unlimited space of writing online is less of a problem/potential than the lack of limits on who participates in the conversation.
It'd be interesting to see an academic treatment of reputation systems online and how they do or don't promote democratic knowledge production.
building and maintaining communities that inspire and sustain participation.
Indeed.
If one loves literature, I think, one now has to be willing to go speculatively where the language of passionate life goes, especially among the young, who will carry on the cool literary adventure.17
I'm there!
it is there in the epic of all the social-news, shared-bookmark, or similar sites that build a portrait of collective life from constantly reshuffled excerpts, links, and tags from that life akin to Homeric formulae.
Still loving this...
at present only a colloquial approximation (if that) of high literate language or literary sensibility.
But from a pedagogical perspective this is the same kind of writing that drives the scholar-teacher day to day.
the stake for literary studies in the digital age is not first of all technological. It is to follow the living language of human thought, hope, love, desire—and hate too—wherever it goes and wherever it has the capacity to be literary, even if the form, style, or grammar of such literariness does not always conform to canonical standards.
Wow! I love this.
Why should contemporary literary scholarship take an interest in contemporary social computing? How should it take an interest?
Great questions!
The real action is in the sidebar that unfurls
repopulate the sparse, lite model of literary activity
redistributed the weights in the core circuit of literary social activity
Today, the margin is the “sidebar” of such social-computing sites as blogs, where all the blog rolls, track-backs, and other signs of the vitality of communal communications manifest.
So cool...
annotators,
Annotators privileged in meaning making.
Study of/support of...
common will to decentralize or democratize the traditional understanding of literary sociality I above called the core circuit of “authors, publishers, readers (and interpreters) mediated by documents”
This was my dominant understanding of lit criticism (and pedagogy) as a grad student.
What writers thought they were doing in writing texts, or printers and booksellers in designing and publishing them, or readers in making sense of them are issues which no history of the book can evade.
Great stuff!
balladmongers
great word
Make it open source, cheap, and true alternatives to the pre-packaged learning management systems that had hijacked innovation.
Right on!
a tool to think with, not a tool to publish with.
I like this distinction a lot. Emphasizes process v product.
You could build these sort of systems in WordPress, Pinboard, Scalar, whatever.
Using h in part?
And immediately you are notified of all pages named this, and presented with a list of pages those pages link to.
I'm dense, but how is this different from a search engine?
conversation
Still unclear to me how this term is being used...
There’s a billion people posting what they think about crap on Facebook. There’s about 31,000 active wikipedians that hold English Wikipedia together. That’s about the population of Stanford University, students, faculty and staff combined, for the entire English speaking world. We should be ashamed. We really should.
Great quote.
In 2015, out of nowhere, we saw web annotation break into the mainstream. This is a garden technology that has risen and fallen so many times, and suddenly people just get it. Suddenly web annotation, which used to be hard to explain, makes sense to people. When that sort of thing happens culturally it’s worth looking closely at.
Right on. What's the evidence of this mainstream, though?
The web not as a reconfigurable model of understanding but of sealed shut presentations.
Ummm, not so sure about this. There of course is a sealedness to the streaming web--especially in that it's hard if not impossible to extract the data. But anyone who's on Facebook knows that statements are replied to and conversation start and understanding is challenged, reproduced, etc.
conversational trail (a sort of “read this if you want to understand what I am riffing on” link) instead of associations of ideas.
Not sure I see the distinction.
The majority of links in the memex are made by readers, not writers. On the world wide web of course, only an author gets to determine links.
KEY!
link here is not part of the author’s intent, but of the reader’s analysis.
Hyperlinks need to be divided into genres. Those produced by editors and authors are ultimately not that radical or at least different from those we might find in the pages of a book.
Hyperlinks (and annotations) created by writers, now that's something else entirely. That's like David Foster Wallace's annotated copy of Don DeLillo's Players (house at the HRC), as opposed to a copy easily bought at a bookstore.
Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.
How can annotation do this? Again, I come back to a tagging or foldering system needed to bring some coherence to the process of annotation...
In the stream metaphor you don’t experience the Stream by walking around it and looking at it, or following it to its end. You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by.
This is such a powerfully visceral description of different experiences of the web.
“web as space”
...text as space. To inhabit. Via annotation. (Jennifer Howard in Chronicle article.)
the garden and the stream
This is, I believe, a smart reworking of a much reworked archetype in American studies: the machine in the garden analogy of Leo Marx:
the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless, integrative, iterative, something less personal and less self-assertive, something more solitary yet more connected.
I'll be curious to see how "conversation" is the problem here, rather than the proprietary, closed nature of these platforms.
the way in which we collaborate on the web,
But the above anecdote isn't collaboration. It's personal note-taking. What happens when--and how does--someone else enter the picture?
simple knowledge that builds complexity through linking.
Could this be accomplished through annotation?
IMHO, yes. Though in the case of hypothes.is, I need a better way to view/organize my annotations...
how does annotation affect the way readers read and understand a text?
How do readers effect the way a text is annotated and understood?
but literary texts work differently.
Hasn't cultural criticism moved beyond this literary exceptionalism? (The authors later aspire to interdisciplinary application of their methodology, so one would hope so.)
the practice of annotation was rather difficult, because of the lack of a theory of literary annotation.
Really? It seems like there's such a rich tradition to build upon at least in terms of models. I could edit a Norton edition of several novels without a manual on annotation.
establish certain methodologies, which will in turn require some conceptual clarification as to why a text should be annotated—in other words, a theory of annotation
I'm more worried about the product/feature side of the future for digitally edited/editable texts.
student peer-learning project
This is the coolest part of the project, but one the authors speak very little about. It seems the labor of expert commentary was just farmed out to students.
explanatory annotation
The limited definition of annotation/commentary is not unacknowledged. It's a clear starting point for the authors.
establishes or promotes specific interpretations.
Yuck. This especially seems limiting: emphasis on a singularity of meaning seems extra-traditional.
Commentary as a practice of annotation that not only helps readers comprehend a text but also facilitates its critical evaluation elucidates the relevance of the text for a particular readership and establishes or promotes specific interpretations.
I think like we're working with a very limited (even if acknowledged) definition of commentary/annotation. We're really just talking about expert analysis laid over a text, which is nothing new, though as pointed out below this tradition can achieve a new dynamism in the online environment.
What I think is more interesting about annotation and the digital humanities is the potential for readers themselves to become truly active contributors to the knowledge surrounding the texts--not simply served explanation for their relatively passive comprehension.
Whipping Boys Explained: Literary Annotation and Digital Humanities
From the start, the framework for thinking about annotation is "explanation." To me this is problematic. For if the digital humanities is to truly leverage the open, democratic potential of the Web, it must not merely explain, offer information in the same uni-directional format that knowledge has been "produced" throughout much of history. Annotation as it happens has the potential to be one of the main tools through which to disperse the agency of knowledge production.
Commentary
Very different understanding of this word from its everyday use on the Internet. Online, commentary is more typically imagined as far less authorial or editorial, problematically, but also democratically so.
commentary aims at situating a text and its objects communicatively through explanation.
Again, this seems a limited understanding of annotation. Situating a text is a very traditional scholarly act. The process of locating it might be focused on as something more emergent, democratic, and discursive.
OER even found support at the federal level in 2015, with the US Department of Education hiring Andy Marcinek in September to be its first ever “open education adviser”
Very interesting...
a resistance to the mainstream ed-tech industry, suspicion about institutional power, a DIY sensibility.
Right on.
Caulfield’s keynote: “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.”
This is a great talk and one that situates annotation as a "garden tool" (versus stream tool like Facebook).
“templated self.”
Great phrase, but don't people love templates? Isn't every restaurant menu or clothing store a kind of template preferred to making your own meals or clothes?
University of Mary Washington, but at Davidson College, the University of Oklahoma, Brigham Young University, and elsewhere – including high schools.
Potential partners in "Annotate in all Classrooms"...
thanks to Indie Web startups like Known and Hypothes.is,
Hadn't seen this mention of h yet by Audrey Watters. We're "Indie Ed-Tech"!
it supports students and teachers and schools in managing their own infrastructure, their own labor, their own data.
Ok, so is hypothes.is doing this? How can it?
my annotations must be better accessible/organizable --the current "My Annotations" is not enough
annotation must be exportable
The principles of IndieWebCamp,
Check it out...
“learn-to-code” efforts (which as I’ve argued elsewhere are more about what employers want than they are about what students need).
Interesting...
ed-tech as data-extraction, control, surveillance, privatization, and profiteering
But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like.
Wow, this is totally the DFW fantasy of Infinite Jest.
Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favour of watching and listening?
I'm not particularly worried about this.
When Facebook can know us better than our parents with only 150 likes, and better than our spouses with 300 likes, the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses.
Crazy...
what about the unique web address for my social network profile?
Hadn't thought about this.
I might be able to download my posts
Would you?
That’s how Isis is recruiting and growing.
Wow. Blaming "the stream" of social media for ISIS! How does that square with the celebration of social media as democratizing force in the Arab Spring?...
Algorithms have picked everything for you. According to what you or your friends have read or seen before, they predict what you might like to see. It feels great not to waste time in finding interesting things on so many websites. But what are we exchanging for efficiency?
I get how algorithms can be abused and problematize knowledge production or discovery. But is there such a thing as a benevolent algorithm? Certainly there are some benefits to the data analysis that goes into reading my social activity and networks for "recommendations." Netflix has steered me right more than a few times in this regard.
Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind.
But what about Facebook? I'm constantly linking (sort of) to other content via Facebook posts.
in the world of webpages, gaze functions differently: it is more empowering.
Interesting subversion of the academic trope of the gaze. Though I'm not sure sight is the best analogy for the power of the hyperlink.
cul-de-sacs of social media
Great phrase.
But links are not objects, they are relations between objects. This objectivisation has stripped hyperlinks of their immense powers.
Devaluing of the hyperlink in "the Stream" (i.e. Facebook). Because it becomes an end in and of itself rather than a bridge to another place? Facebook doesn't want you to leave Facebook.
The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralisation – all the links, lines and hierarchies – and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks.
Hyperlink as decentralization.
There were no real apps, certainly not how we think of them today. There was no Instagram, no SnapChat, WhatsApp. Instead, there was the web, and on the web, there were blogs: the best place to find alternative thoughts, news and analysis.
The transition away from the Web to apps is one I keep seeing lamented among the old school Internet activists.
An influx of new, shamelessly luxurious condos had replaced the charming little houses I was familiar with.
Sounds familiar: Austin, DC, Brooklyn.
it is easier to read Ulysses than it is to read the Internet.
Great line. What does this mean for the state of the humanities?...
The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness."
Perhaps hypothes.is should organize its "stream" by document (and tag) in resistance to the Stream? I for one want to view my annotations by doc and have the ability to organize my docs into folders.
Works everywhere that learning takes place
You have to!
General notes on stream:
sorted by text (not annotation)
tags used on text listed
tags link to stream sorted by tag
most recent annotation nested?--annotations on doc should be collapsable/expandable
Page level notes:
General description of group, including an icon.
Easy to get the content via RSS.
Easily sortable stream: recent, popular, filter...
tag "cloud"--tags link to text with tags
list of members (with avatars)
community Diigo group.
What would it take to use hypothes.is instead?
"Read a lot in the writings that were part of the early stages of the design of the Internet," Campbell said. "It's very aspirational stuff. There were dreams that were at the heart of what formed this digital environment." Reaching back to the Internet's earliest days, he noted, will help higher education advocates understand that the culture of a university should be about more than content or course delivery.
hashtag vannevar
"between-ness centrality" — those individuals who become "hubs" and connect with others on a frequency that's greater than others, becoming, in some ways, "poster people" for integrated thinking and connective learning.
How could we measure this in Hypothes.is?
how many connections are made through a Twitter stream at the beginning of a course as opposed to the end of the course?
Could map this with annotations too...
the way the instructor's presence could be made almost tangible within the environment
Annotation really does this.
"We're trying to make the network explicit," he said, "to help students demonstrate the connections they're making as they move through curriculum, as they begin to get these higher-order thinking skills."
e-portfolio, documenting their work
Again, hypothes.is needs to make e-portfolios of annotation (and bookmarking) better.
students to continue to use the blogs, Web sites and social media tools as they advance through their collegiate careers.
Cross-course, multi-year tool.
"Rampages" (named after VCU's mascot, the Ram)
Ok, so Tressie and Jon have been using h herein.
tweeting
"Tweeting." It's a company. A VC-funded one.
the hostile environments so many experience when it comes to experimenting locally with ed-tech versus an almost infantile trust in our corporate overlords when it comes to outsourcing.
How are both these things happening at the same time, though?
little to no impact on the tech giants to which many K-12 schools, colleges, and universities blissfully outsource their innovation.
There must be some kind of other disconnect here, though. I've always been asked about FERPA--mostly by teachers and professors who have in turn been pressured by administrators. Surely this must enter into conversations with Google Pearson, et al.
What constitutes an education record is a bit blurry, making FERPA the bat it has become internally to shut down most conversations about sharing publicly on the web.
Yeah, this is the problematic side effect of FERPA: it works against public use of the open web, a skill necessary for our students to practice.
Learn to take ownership and control over the content you put on the web instead of handing it to third-party publishers.
Such an admirable principle/mission. I wonder though whether this will ever be part of a larger cultural turn? Or even if it will be a major part of 21st century digital pedagogy?...