Dr. Ryan Straight (Twitter)Has anyone gathered a collection of interesting and/or unexpected ways of using @hypothes_is beyond its standard use case? @xolotl #SquadGoalsNetwork
— Dr. Ryan "Rebel Without a Clause" Straight (@RyanStraight) December 7, 2019
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 have used @hypothes_is with qualaitative research, @dogtrax @tellio and the rest of our #clmooc crew do weird poetry and multimodal annotation art all the time. @judell just released a survey tool we are using as part of #credweb (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com/s/1Jkthd)
Replied to a tweet by Hungry Bread Elevator (Twitter)
Some of the off-label uses of Hypothes.is have been enumerated lately, including some I’ve mentioned.
I’ve tinkered a bit with CROWDLAAERS, but it’s always seemed to me geared toward a very niche audience including teachers potentially using it for grading? Perhaps I’m missing some more of its flexibility? Remi Kalir might be able to help elucidate it or indicate if he’s noticed anyone using it for off-label usage.
I might see it being more useful if one could analyze site-wide annotations on a domain with a wild-card search of this sort: https://tomcritchlow.com/*.
I have to imagine that it would be cool to see all the annotations and conversations across something like the New York Times with a data visualization tool like this.
Jon Udell and gang are aware of Webmention, but haven’t pulled the trigger (yet) on making the decision to build them in. I’ve outlined some methods for making their platform a bit more IndieWeb friendly by adding markup and some additional HTML to allow people to force the system to be able to send webmentions. I do frequently use Jon’s facet tool to check highlighting and annotation activity on my website.
I have found Crowdlaaers useful several times in that I’m aware that some pages are annotated, but they’re either not public or are part of other groups for which I’m not a member. An example of this is this page on my website which has one annotation which I can’t see, but by using Crowdlaaers, I can. Another example is viewing annotations on sites that have subsequently blocked Hypothes.is like this example. Of course, sometimes you’ll do this and find odd bugs floating around in the system.
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I’ve outlined the potentiality of using Hypothes.is as a CMS platform in the past. Heather has apparently taken it to heart and gone full bore.
I hadn’t included it at the time, but private groups are also an interesting way to share ideas and private posts with small groups of people. You could also use those groups as taxonomies for keeping private notebooks as well. While the primary instance of Hypothes.is that many use would technically be considered a silo, keep in mind that it’s open source, so you could technically host it for yourself as an IndieWeb project! Now to get support for Webmention and Micropub! 😉
I’d also recently done a quick survey of some of the bigger accounts I was aware of and suspected that there must be one or two edge cases in the 10,000+ range. I knew a bot user or two were likely way ahead, but figured there was at least one person with a huge number of posts hiding out there. Great to know my hypothesis was right!
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Outline for a Hypothes.is Crash Course
I often find examples to be most immediately helpful. You might look at Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN: Marginal Syllabus 2018-19 which has some solid multimedia resources around a group of educators annotating. It’s not only an interesting public example, but will introduce you to some helpful people in the space.
For a “textbook” example, I believe American Yawp may be one of the most annotated textbooks online.
I Annotate 2019 was an interesting conference and Hypothes.is has kindly aggregated videos of all(?) the talks. You can skim through some to find applications relevant to your interests. In addition to this example, the H blog is also a great resource for other examples and news.
More specific to your initial question, you’ve got a lot of options. You can open .pdfs on your local machine and annotate via Hypothesis, but if it’s for a bigger group, hosting it somewhere on the web that is easily accessible may be best. Hypothesis has also made some significant leaps for integrating their product into LMSes recently which also helps in seamlessly making accounts for new users.
Once it’s available to the group, you may want to decide whether you want the group to annotate in the public channel or if you want to annotate in a smaller private group.
Most importantly, explore. Have fun. There are lots of off-label uses you’ll run across using the tool as you play around.
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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