Come join us for coffee/tea and general chat in the Lounge at #IAnno21 before the sessions start in about 15 minutes.
Category: Social Stream
If you haven’t read their book Annotation yet, today’s keynote #AnnoConvo: A Conversation about Annotation, Literacy, and Learning at I Annotate 2021 promises to be the next best thing. It’s a must see for readers, note takers, and thinkers of all stripes.
Free registration is still open for those who’d like to attend remotely.
Antero Garcia (Stanford University) and Remi Kalir (University of Colorado Denver) will discuss their recently published book Annotation (MIT Press) and the literary, scholarly, civic, and everyday significance of annotation across historical and contemporary contexts. Their conversation will focus on social annotation contributing to learners’ digital and civic literacies, how annotation enables creative and critical learning, as well as implications for teacher education and professional learning.
If it helps, I’ve got three copies of the book in various formats, one for each time I’ve read it. My biggest disappointment of remote attendance for IAnno21 is that I was hoping to get the title page of my copy of the book annotated by the authors.
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.
Google apparently gave up on the whole “don’t be evil” bit. Their long-standing about page with their philosophy started serving 301s for a bit after June 14th and is now 404.
Watch out internet. 👀
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.
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
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.