Month: June 2021

Bookmarked An Excerpt From The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (Penguin)
Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.
Suggested Annotated Reading from the I Annotate 2021 Keynote: Courtney McClellan
Just days before the 10th anniversary of the Smallest Federated Wiki, Ward Cunningham will be talking about the future of note taking tomorrow morning.

Free registration for the event at I Annotate 2021 should still be open.

There are also expected appearances by Daniel Doyon, Co-Founder of Readwise; Tienson Qin, Creator/Founder of LogSeq; Oliver Sauter, Founder of WorldBrain/Memex, and Flancian of the Anagora.

With any luck, it may help mark a resurgence of digital versions of the commonplace book on the order of magnitude represented by the works of Rudolphus Agricola, Desiderius Erasmus, and Philip Melanchthon during the Renaissance.

Promo card for I Annotate 2021 with the subtitle Reading Together and featuring a drawing of a book with two hands writing on each other in an ouroboros-like style

Read Collaborative Community Review on PubPub by Heather Staines

In preparation for Peer Review Week, I wanted to take a closer look at some of the collaborative community review experiments that have happened recently on PubPub. Finding new ways to harness engagement in scholarly communications is a goal of the Knowledge Futures Group, and inline annotation is a technology that I rely upon every day to organize my thoughts and track my online reading. I reached out to the authors of three forthcoming MIT Press books that have undergone this type of review during the last year. I was excited to learn about their experiences and to share some of their observations here.

A short text “interview” with the authors of three works that posted versions of their books online for an open review via annotation.

These could be added to the example and experience of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.

“Criticism is a marker of respect and an acknowledgement that others see in us the ability to learn.” they noted. ❧

quote from Catherine D’Ignazio, Assistant Professor, Emerson College, and Lauren Klein, Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology, authors of Data Feminism.
Annotated on June 21, 2021 at 07:57AM

He notes that authors of such projects should consider the return on investment. It take time to go through community feedback, so one needs to determine whether the pay off will be worthwhile. Nevertheless, if his next work is suitable for community review, he’d like to do it again. ❧

This is an apropos question. It is also somewhat contingent on what sort of platform the author “owns” to be able to do outreach and drive readers and participation.
Annotated on June 21, 2021 at 05:12PM

Some brief thoughts on I Annotate 2021 from today

I both learned and had a lot of fun at I Annotate 2021 today. Since annotation is something I do literally on a daily basis (pun intended), it’s nice to devote some significant time to thinking about the idea and the process as well as to see and hear how others practice it in a wide variety of settings.

For those catching up, I’ve posted a number of items, bookmarks, reads, notes, and annotations to my website today under the I Annotate 2021 tag. You can find copies of most of it mirrored on Hypothesis (along with others using the same tag) at #⁠IAnno21.

I’ve also started a Twitter list of folks who are participating there as well if you care to either follow the list and/or quickly follow other participants. Drop me a note if you know of some I’m either missing or ought to add to the list.

One of my favorite parts is seeing a variety of non-education specific people joining in the conversation.

I can’t wait to see what Ward Cunningham and others have to say about the Future of Note Taking tomorrow. It portends to be my favorite topic of the conference though I’ll reserve judgement until the end.

I can’t see a good/convenient place to arrange a Birds of a Feather (BoF) note taking hallway discussion in the Lounge in tomorrow’s schedule unless we do it at the very end of the day. This would mean potentially missing some people from Europe who I know would like to participate. Perhaps I’ll put something together either for Wednesday morning before the official program or during the 2:30-3:00 PM slot between some of the bigger sessions? Let me know if you’d like to participate. I’m also not sure about the potential limit of 4 people at each of the Lounge areas; if we need more space, perhaps we’ll adjourn to Zoom or a similar platform?

Who else at #I⁠Anno21 has a practice of public annotation using Hypothes.is? Or perhaps on your own website, or other platform? Please share your usernames, URLs, and feeds so we can all have a richer group of examples.

For example, you can find me at https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich, much of which is mirrored on my personal website in various ways as bookmarks, read posts, notes, and even a custom annotation post. Here are a few others I follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

Many annotation tools have scant social features, but there are ways to follow others’ work.

 

Jake Reeder’s Return to Cinder site and related Databyss platform

The coolest thing I think I saw at I Annotate 2021 today was Jake Reeder’s commonplace book for his reading notes and annotations. It’s very IndieWeb in some of the coolest ways.

He apparently began collecting his notes and annotations of Jacques Derrida using paper and pen, but transferred them into the cleverly named website Return to Cinder.

The site ultimately grew to include additional writers and works (thus also making it a personal library of sorts. It ultimately became valuable enough to Reeder that, with the help of Paul Hine for development they turned his site into a note taking platform available for other people called Databyss, which appears to be a silo note taking platform that allows users to:

Write and cite, research and re-search, and never get lost in Databyss. Welcome to your new word processor.

Users can register for a free account which includes hosting and storage, though doesn’t appear to allow custom domain names. I’m not clear what the potential business model is or may be, so be sure you’ve got the ability to back up and save your data elsewhere just in case. The interface looks very similar to Roam Research and some of the similar products in that same niche, though in this case the result is online rather than necessarily a private local repository or a private space in the cloud.

While the lack of end game for Databyss might worry me, the user interface examples of Jake’s personal site and the bigger platform are fascinating for the overall space. It would be cool to see how other IndieWeb building blocks might be included in these platforms to expand the space of both personal libraries and digital gardens.