read | Chris Aldrich

👓 Open web annotation of audio and video | Jon Udell

Read Open web annotation of audio and video by

Jon Udell (Jon Udell)

Text, as the Hypothesis annotation client understands it, is HTML, or PDF transformed to HTML. In either case, it’s what you read in a browser, and what you select when you make an annotation. What’s the equivalent for audio and video? It’s complicated because although browsers enable us to select passages of text, the standard media players built into browsers don’t enable us to select segments of audio and video. It’s trivial to isolate a quote in a written document. Click to set your cursor to the beginning, then sweep to the end. Now annotation can happen. The browser fires a selection event; the annotation client springs into action; the user attaches stuff to the selection; the annotation server saves that stuff; the annotation client later recalls it and anchors it to the selection. But selection in audio and video isn’t like selection in text. Nor is it like selection in images, which we easily and naturally crop. Selection of audio and video happens in the temporal domain. If you’ve ever edited audio or video you’ll appreciate what that means. Setting a cursor and sweeping a selection isn’t enough. You can’t know that you got the right intro and outro by looking at the selection. You have to play the selection to make sure it captures what you intended. And since it probably isn’t exactly right, you’ll need to make adjustments that you’ll then want to check, ideally without replaying the whole clip.

Jon Udell has been playing around with media fragments to create some new functionality in Hypothes.is. The nice part is that he’s created an awesome little web service for quickly and easily editing media fragments online for audio and video (including YouTube videos) which he’s also open sourced on GitHub.

I suspect that media fragments experimenters like Aaron Parecki, Marty McGuire, Kevin Marks, and Tantek Çelik will appreciate what he’s doing and will want to play as well as possibly extend it. I’ve already added some of the outline to the IndieWeb wiki page for media fragments (and a link to fragmentions) which has some of their prior work.

I too look forward to a day where web browsers have some of this standardized and built in as core functionality.

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Open web annotation of audio and video

This selection tool has nothing intrinsically to do with annotation. It’s job is to make your job easier when you are constructing a link to an audio or video segment.

I’m reminded of a JavaScript tool written by Aaron Parecki that automatically adds a start fragment to the URL of his page when the audio on the page is paused. He’s documented it here: https://indieweb.org/media_fragment

(If I were Virginia Eubanks I might want to capture the pull quote myself, and display it on my book page for visitors who aren’t seeing it through the Hypothesis lens.)

Of course, how would she know that the annotation exists? Here’s another example of where adding webmentions to Hypothesis for notifications could be useful, particularly when they’re more widely supported. I’ve outlined some of the details here in the past: http://boffosocko.com/2016/04/07/webmentions-for-improving-annotation-and-preventing-bullying-on-the-web/

🎧 North Korea Reaches Out | The Daily – New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: North Korea Reaches Out by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

South Korea says that the North is willing to talk about dismantling its atomic arsenal. What happened to the threat of nuclear war?

A nice breakdown on recent history of North Korea and nuclear weapons.

🎧 Silenced | The Daily – New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: Silenced by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

A complex system has developed to mute women who accuse powerful men. One of those women is an actress who said she had an affair with Donald J. Trump.

These types of horrific tactics should be outlawed.

👓 Most major outlets have used Russian tweets as sources for partisan opinion: study | Columbia Journalism Review

Read Most major outlets have used Russian tweets as sources for partisan opinion: study by Josephine Lukito and Chris Wells (Columbia Journalism Review)

In a new study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we look at how often, and in what context, Twitter accounts from the Internet Research Agency—a St. Petersburg-based organization directed by individuals with close ties to Vladimir Putin, and subject to Mueller’s scrutiny—successfully made their way from social media into respected journalistic media. We searched the content of 33 major American news outlets for references to the 100 most-retweeted accounts among those Twitter identified as controlled by the IRA, from the beginning of 2015 through September 2017. We found at least one tweet from an IRA account embedded in 32 of the 33 outlets—a total of 116 articles—including in articles published by institutions with longstanding reputations, like The Washington Post, NPR, and the Detroit Free Press, as well as in more recent, digitally native outlets such as BuzzFeed, Salon, and Mic (the outlet without IRA-linked tweets was Vice).

How are outlets publishing generic tweets without verifying the users actually exist? This opens up a new type of journalistic fraud in which a writer could keep an army of bots and feed out material that they could then self-quote for their own needs without a story really existing.

🎧 Caitlin Flanagan | The Atlantic Interview

Listened to Caitlin Flanagan by Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic Interview

Caitlin Flanagan wrote a devastating story about the death of a fraternity pledge at Penn State University for the Atlantic last year, and she has updates on the case for editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg. They discuss why fraternities are still attractive to straight, white, well-off young men on college campuses. Flanagan has also started fighting feminists, with her provocative essays on how some women are turning the #MeToo movement into a racket. She sees some women using the moment to take revenge against individual men while doing nothing to topple the patriarchy. She talks about why millennial women are confused and angry about their sexual encounters. She also says that our fear of toxic masculinity is crowding out an honest look at toxic femininity.

An awesome little interview. I’m going to have to listen to this a second time to unpack pieces. Definitely some ideas here worth working through in more depth.

🎧 I Don’t Think I Can Do Anything to Fix It | The Daily – New York Times

Listened to Listen to ‘The Daily’: ‘I Don’t Think I Can Do Anything to Fix It’ by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

Representative Tom Rooney, a Florida Republican, talks about the Russia investigation, gun control and his decision not to run for re-election.

This gives me some interesting ideas about how things might be fixed via game theory. In some sense it may also help if we all (both parties) had a common enemy to fight against. During the Cold War it was Communism we fought against which helped us be on the same side, and as a result we were more united. Now with nothing to “fight against” we’re fighting each other.

This is one of the most interesting episodes of this podcast I’ve come across yet.