Joined: September 9, 2018
Location: Paris
Link: del.icio.us/kael
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone using it this way before, but I’ve coincidentally noticed that Kael seems to be using Hypothes.is in an off-label manner as a bookmarking service with tagging rather than an annotation or highlighting service. Most of their “annotations” are really just basic page notes with one or two “tags” and rarely (if ever) any highlights or annotations.
I’m curious if the Hypothes.is team has considered making such additional functionalities more explicit within their user interface?
Social bookmarking does seem like a useful and worthwhile functionality that would dovetail well with many of their other functionalities as well as their basic audience of users. Perhaps some small visual UI clues and the ability to search for them as a subset would complete the cycle?
Many folks here, including myself, agree! Social bookmarking is a huge category and one we underserve right now. Suggestions for small visual cues (or clues) very welcome! (you can already search by tag of course).
Given how I would suspect that most people use Hypothesis, having a more explicit bookmarking functionality may help to make that a simpler entryway into the rest of its functionality. If Hypothesis could collect traditional bookmarks with tags of things readers are interested in researching, revisiting, reading, and potentially marking up, then it could be a more self-contained product rather than needing to use other services for this. Each part could build upon the next and ultimately allow researchers to use the product as a defacto online commonplace book for their research work.
Naturally, knowing that this is a potential pathway or use case is half the battle for users who might want to use Hypothesis for bookmarking and later revisiting. Page notes with tags could be used for simple quick notes about referent sources or reasons one may wish to log for why they want to revisit certain pages. I wish I had kept it, but I remember a few years back seeing some year end data from the Pocket service that readers who bookmarked more articles generally read more and used the app more even if their percentage of read articles stayed relatively low.
Within the hypothesis UI, in addition to the “eye” and “page” mini-icons for annotations and page notes respectively, one could explicitly add a bookmark icon and allow users to create a bookmark with notes and tags and save things either publicly or privately. In some sense this may really be no different than the functionality of creating page notes which amounts to the same thing, but from a usability perspective, many users are more likely to respond more aptly to a bookmark functionality versus a page note functionality, which requires some additional explanation. Perhaps changing “page note” to “bookmark” (with the ability to still create page notes in the text box) may make more sense to a broader audience? Looking at the number of page notes with a bookmark flavor versus traditional highlights/annotations may give some idea of how useful this may be.
From within the user data view (example: at https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich) the page is primarily about lists of annotations (by time) with links by tag in the sidebar. The main part of the page could be split with two tabs at the top that differentiate between traditional annotations and then bookmarks. At some point it may be useful to have a read/unread data toggle to allow users to differentiate between the two to give themselves a dashboard of unread documents with similar views by tag. UI cues can easily be had by looking at extant platform examples like Pocket, Instapaper, and Pinboard, though simple and clean UIs may be more valuable to Hypothesis versus the more visual UIs of these others, particularly given that the academic market that Hypothesis services isn’t as visual-oriented.
Some of this is reminiscent to me of services like Zotero or Mendeley, though these tend to have the reference data at their heart with some of these additional functionalities of bookmarking, read/unread, and notes/annotations bolted on as also-ran ideas. The piece that really draws me back to Hypothesis over these others, is that it has the reading, annotating, and interacting at its heart and doesn’t worry about the reference portion which is really the add-on or after-the-fact functionality that is easy enough when it comes to ultimately publishing much further down the line. In some sense, these customized products are starting at the end and building to the beginning of the workflow while Hypothesis covers the majority of the middle incredibly well.
Within this general framework, being able to bookmark documents that I’d like to read becomes the start of the journey for the research, writing, interacting, and thinking which Hypothesis already has at its core. The real missing piece is making the social bookmarking a bit more explicit and providing some simple views for users to see what they’ve bookmarked (as well as views by date and tag) so they can determine what they need to read and work on next.
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I use @hypothes_is in a similar manner. Just as much as a curation tool for myself as a collaborative annotation tool.
I always thought that’s what private annotations were for. That’s how I use it.
I recently checked to see how many bookmarks are in the corpus of annotations. Results:
2.2% anchored annotations with tags but no text
1.6% page notes with tags but no text
3.8% bookmarks
Note that almost half of those are related to web.hypothes.is/blog/annotatio….
Thanks for the statistics Jon. Given that there’s no explicit interface or instructions for it I expected the numbers to be relatively low. My guess would have been somewhere in the 5-10% range though as an unintended emergent behavior.
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@hypothes_is subsumes classic social bookmarking and (like Diigo) extends it to selections within web pages.
Here’s a very powerful (and timely) link: hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3…
Does this require an explicit interface, or instructions? If so, what do you envision?
Sorry Jon, I put some of the interface ideas in another part of the thread you may have missed:
see just above…
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OK, I found it.
“changing “page note” to “bookmark” (with the ability to still create page notes in the text box) may make more sense to a broader audience?”
I think that merits consideration.
The SciBot annotations are not what we normally think of as bookmarks. But I think they qualify. Classification of text fragments is something that both humans and robots do.
It’s a big part of my @hypothes_is usage–but everyone knows that I’m an #annotation zealot!
maybe sorpin.com/9littleboxes/ ?
What a great prompt! Here are a few interesting off-label use cases I’ve used, imagined, or seen in the wild:
Greg McVerry, Ian O’Byrne, and I have integrated Hypothes.is into our digital/online commonplace books in different ways. Greg’s are embedded at https://jgregorymcverry.com/annotations, Ian discusses his process on his site, while mine show up as annotation or highlight posts.
I’ve not published the full idea yet, but I’ve spent some time contemplating using Hypothes.is as a blogging platform/CMS. It might require a bit of flexibility, but it generally has reasonable support for:
Writing posts with a reasonably full-featured text editor and the ability to edit and delete posts later;
HTML and markdown support;
Public and private posting as well as sharing content with other private groups;
The ability to reply to other websites;
The ability for others to comment on your posts natively;
A robust tagging functionality;
The ability to socially bookmark web pages (blank page notes);
An RSS feed;
The ability to share posts to other social platforms including meta data for Twitter cards;
Naturally, it’s very easy to use for writing short notes, creating highlights and annotations, and keeping track of what you’ve read;
It has a pseudo-social media functionality in that your public posts appear on a global timeline where people can read and interact with them.
It’s also opensource, so you can self-host, modify it, or add new features.
I have been personally using Hypothes.is to follow the public feed, several tag feeds, and several friends’ specific feeds as a discovery tool for finding interesting content to read.
And a final off-label use case that could be compelling, but which could have some better UI and integration would be to use Hypothes.is as an embeddable commenting system for one’s own website. It has in-line commenting in much the same way that Medium does, but the entire thing could likely be embedded into a comment section under a traditional blog post and be used in much the same way people use Disqus on blogs. I’ll note that in practice, I find Hypothes.is far faster than Disqus ever was. I’ve yet to see anyone offloading the commenting functionality of their blog this way, but I’d be willing to bet dollars to donuts that someone could hack it together as a simple iframe or via the API pretty quickly and with solid results.
And naturally I’m missing many, potentially including some I’ve thought about before. Maybe worth checking the old Hypothes.is tag in my digital notebook?
If people have others, I’m enamored to hear them.
I could see a potential demand (beyond me) for a one-click install of Hypothesis, the open source, web annotation, highlight, and bookmarking service. It’s got a number of moving pieces and should be ideal for such a cloud-based use case and likely has a significant overlap with the customer base for Reclaim.
Main company site: https://web.hypothes.is/ 2
GitHub repositories: Hypothesis · GitHub 3
Documentation for set up using docker: Installation guide — The Hypothesis Annotation Framework 0.0.2 documentation 1
Given what it offers, I could see people also potentially using it as a CMS, blogging platform, or social bookmarking platform:
https://boffosocko.com/2019/12/08/rx-for-off-label-uses-of-hypothes-is/
https://boffosocko.com/2018/10/11/hypothesis-user-kael/
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