👓 Hypothesis Launches App to Bring Annotation to Learning Management Systems | Hypothes.is

Read Hypothesis Launches App to Bring Annotation to Learning Management Systems by Jeremy Dean (Hypothes.is)

We are excited to announce the official launch of the Hypothesis LMS app. Thanks to the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, Hypothesis now integrates with all major LTI-compliant Learning Management Systems, including Instructure Canvas, Blackboard Learn, D2L Brightspace, Moodle, and Sakai. We will be testing other platforms, including MOOC-providers like Coursera and edX in the coming weeks and months.

With this release, Hypothesis is better prepared to support the strong adoption we already see in teaching and learning. Students and teachers are a majority of the nearly 200 thousand annotators who have created over 4.3 million annotations using Hypothesis. The new LMS integration means teachers can bring collaborative annotation in their classrooms seamlessly as a part of their normal workflow.

👓 Viewing and exporting Hypothesis annotations | Jon Udell | Hypothesis

Read Viewing and exporting Hypothesis annotations by Jon Udell (Hypothes.is Blog)

We’re delighted to see Roderic Page and Kris Shaffer putting the Hypothesis API to work. For us, the API isn’t just a great way to integrate Hypothesis with other systems. It’s also a way to try out ideas that inform the development of Hypothesis.

Today I’ll share two of those ideas. One is a faceted viewer that displays sets of annotations by user, group, and tag. The other exports annotations to several formats. If you’re a Hypothesis user, you may find these helpful until proper implementations are built into the product (faceted viewer: soon, export: later). And your feedback will help us design and build those features. If you’re a developer, you can use these as examples to learn to form API queries, authenticate for access to private and group annotations, parse JSON responses, and navigate threaded conversations.

🔖 View and export Hypothesis annotations

Bookmarked View and export Hypothesis annotations (jonudell.info)
Click HTML, CSV, or JSON to search for matching Hypothesis annotations and display them in one of those formats. Fill in one or more facets to filter results. The facets are username, url (or wildcard_uri), tag, and any. If you need more than 400 results, set max to a larger number. If you just click a button without specifying any facets other than the default group Public, you'll get the most recent 400 Hypothesis annotations in the Public group.

🔖 Rename Hypothesis tags

Bookmarked Rename Hypothesis tags (jonudell.info)
This tool lists your Hypothesis tags, and enables you to rename one or more of them.

Please do make a safe copy your annotations first. And proceed with care. There's a kind of information loss that's possible unrelated to any technical malfunction. Suppose you are using three tags, A, B, and C, to classify annotations into three buckets. Then you rename B to C. Now bucket B is gone. There is only A, unchanged. and C, which includes what was in B. You can't reverse the arrow of entropy and reconstitute the set of annotations that were in B!

👓 Renaming Hypothesis tags | Jon Udell

Read Renaming Hypothesis tags by Jon UdellJon Udell (Jon Udell)
Wherever social tagging is supported as an optional feature, its use obeys a power law. Some people use tags consistently, some sporadically, most never. This chart of Hypothesis usage illustrates the familiar long-tail distribution: https://i0.wp.com/jonudell.info/images/hypothesis-tag-density.jpg ...

📑 An Illustrated Guide to Making People Get Lost | New York Times

Annotated How to Say ‘No’ This Thanksgiving by Darcie Wilder (New York Times)
Why, though, do we not romanticize our preservation? The same matter of chance, of the fleeting nature of fate exists on the other side of the coin. What would have happened if we were better rested, if our energy was better preserved, if we managed our time and said what we really mean? Rarely do we approach whether we get eight hours of sleep with the same guilt as we do whether or not we attended a party, even when, according to sleep expert Matthew Walker, sleep deprivation prevents the brain from remembering information, creating new memories, and sustaining emotional well-being.  
A great observation!

👓 Who says neuroscientists don’t need more brains? Annotation with SciBot | Hypothesis

Read Who says neuroscientists don’t need more brains? Annotation with SciBot by Maryann Martone (web.hypothes.is/blog/)
You might think that neuroscientists already have enough brains, but apparently not. Over 100 neuroscientists attending the recent annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SFN), took part in an annotation challenge: modifying scientific papers to add simple references that automatically generate and attach Hypothesis annotations, filled with key related information. To sweeten the pot, our friends at Gigascience gave researchers who annotated their own papers their very own brain hats.

🔖 Hypothesis User: kael

Bookmarked Hypothesis User: kael (hypothes.is)
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?

Reply to Florian Weil on annotations and webmention

Replied to Florian Weil on Twitter (Twitter)
“@memotv Isn't the annotations standard by w3c for this kind of needs? https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ this article summarised the key points very good https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/08/28/all-about-open-annotation/ for some more functional link back, I can highly recommend to check the indieweb webmentions”
Reminds me that I need to circle back to this discussion:

👓 My Feedly wishlist | Paul Jacobson

Replied to My Feedly wishlist by Paul Jacobson (Paul Jacobson)
Richard MacManus wrote about the state of feed readers as he saw it in his AltPlatform.org post titled “The state of feed readers”. He mentioned a couple things in his Feedly wishlist that prompted me to think more about what I’d like to see added to Feedly.

Feedly and custom sharing

Apparently there were a bunch of us thinking and writing about feed readers and the open web a year ago last June. Several week’s prior to Richard’s article, I’d written a piece for Richard’s now defunct AltPlatform entitled Feed reader revolution (now archived on my site), which laid out some pieces similar to Paul’s take here, though it tied in some more of what was then the state of the art in IndieWeb tech.

Around that time I began tinkering with other feed readers including Inoreader, which I’ve been using for it’s ability to auto-update my RSS feeds using OPML subscriptions from the OPML files I maintain on my own website. Currently I’m more interested in what the Microsub specification is starting to surface in the feed reader space.

I’m not sure if he’s played around with it since, but, like Paul, I was using some of the Press This bookmarklet functionality in conjunction with David Shanske’s Post Kinds plugin for WordPress to make posting snippets of things to my website easier.

Feedly has a Pro (aka paid) functionality to allow one to share content using custom URLs.

Screenshot of the custom share functionality set up from within Feedly.com.

While one can use the Share to WordPress URL functionality, I’d recommend the Custom Sharing feature.  Using the Post Kinds plugin, one can use the following example URL to quickly share things from their Feedly account to their personal website:

https://example.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kindurl=URL&kind=bookmark

One should change the URL to reflect their own site, and one can also change the word “bookmark” to the appropriate desired kind including “like”, “favorite”, “read”, or any of the others they may have enabled within the Post Kinds plugin.

I personally don’t use this method as it only allows one custom sharing URL (and thus allows only one post kind), and instead (again) prefer Inoreader which allows one to configure custom sharing similarly to Feedly, but doesn’t limit the number of kinds and the feature is available in their free tier as well.

In addition to some of what I’ve written about the Post Kinds plugin before, I’ve also detailed how to dovetail it with sharing from my Android phone quickly in the past.

Highlights and Annotations

Also like Paul, I was greatly interested in quickly creating highlights and annotations on web content and posting them to my own website. Here I’m using a modified version of the Post Kinds plugin to accomplish this having created highlight posts and annotation posts for my site. Next I’m utilizing the ability to prepend http://via.hypothes.is to URLs on my mobile phone to call up the ability to use my Hypothesis account to easily and quickly create highlights and annotations. I then use some details from the outline linked below to capture that data via RSS using IFTTT.com.

Naturally, the process could be streamlined a lot from a UI perspective, but I think it provides some fairly nice results without a huge amount of work.

An Outline for Using Hypothesis for Owning your Annotations and Highlights

I will mention that I’ve seen bugs in trying to annotate easily on Chrome’s mobile application, but haven’t had any issues in using Firefox’s mobile browser.

📺 Using Hypothesis with PDFs in Google Classroom and Google Drive | YouTube

Watched Using Hypothesis with PDFs in Google Classroom and Google Drive by Ian O'Byrne from YouTube

We've had some challenges using Hypothesis on PDFs in Google Classroom and Google Drive. This video shows exactly how to get around this problem and quickly get back to your web annotations.

👓 Hypothes.is Collector | John Stewart

Bookmarked Hypothes.is Collector by John Stewart (John Stewart)
In order to make it easier to track activity in Hypothes.is, I created a program called Hypothes.is Collector. The idea is that you can type in user name, a URL, a tag, or a group ID and click the button to see all of the related annotations. The program will create a new sheet with an archive of up to 200 annotations based on the search terms. It will then create a third sheet that will count how many of these annotations were made on each URL in the set by each user.
This seems like it could be an interesting tool for annotations in a classroom setting and is related to some of the broader Hypothes.is API tools.

cc: Greg McVerry, W. Ian O’Bryne

👓 Hypothesis and how it is changing how we read online | Shannon Griffiths

Read Hypothesis and how it is changing how we read online by Shannon GriffithsShannon Griffiths (essentiallyshannon.blogspot.com)
Today I just wanted to quickly review an awesome tool called Hypothesis that I've been using all semester for two of my English classes (Currents in American Lit and Critical Theory).

📑 Cantinflas | Wikipedia

Annotated Cantiflas (Wikipedia)
Among the things that endeared him to his public was his comic use of language in his films; his characters (all of which were really variations of the main "Cantinflas" persona but cast in different social roles and circumstances) would strike up a normal conversation and then complicate it to the point where no one understood what they were talking about. The Cantinflas character was particularly adept at obfuscating the conversation when he owed somebody money, was courting an attractive young woman, or was trying to talk his way out of trouble with authorities, whom he managed to humiliate without their even being able to tell. This manner of talking became known as Cantinflear, and it became common parlance for Spanish speakers to say "¡estás cantinfleando!" (loosely translated as you're pulling a "Cantinflas!" or you're "Cantinflassing!") whenever someone became hard to understand in conversation.
Similar to doubletalk, technobabble, and other varieties of speech.

See also: https://boffosocko.com/2016/09/30/complexity-isnt-a-vice-10-word-answers-and-doubletalk-in-election-2016/

Reply to dailyponderance on public reading

Replied to a post by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION)

Today’s #dailyponderance comes from us via Cheri Who read about @hypothesis in @chrisaldrich’s last #dailyponderance post. Your point to ponder what does public reading mean? Does performative nature come into play?

Join the private group Cheri created, annotate @zephoria’s first two chapters as you read, then post a reflection about the reading

I suspect that my definition of public reading is quite different than most because I’ve been actively doing it for over a year or so now. I post nearly everything I read onto my personal website, and quite often with my notes, highlights, annotations, and some brief analysis. Rarely, if ever, do people react or interact with it, though on occasion it will spark a nice, albiet short discussion. In some part, I post all of it for my own personal consumption and later search, though perhaps one day someone will come across something and it will light a bigger fire. Who knows?

It all reminds me of something my friend P.M. Forni once told me about his own writing as a scholar of the early Italian Renaissance. He said he thought it was sad that only about eleven people would ever read any of his academic writing at a very deep level, but he was far more gratified to be able to write prescriptive books on the area of civility and living a better life that were featured on Oprah and had readers in the millions. I’m happy to write on these topics and have no readers–besides myself–whatsoever.

Of course all of this to say, that as educators we still ought to provide relatively safe spaces for students to try on ideas, make arguments, and see what comes of it without damaging them in the long run.

I’ve read many online documents that have been annotated by many others, most of them in the early days of Genius.com when it was known as Rap Genius. It has been a while, however, since I’ve read something like boyd’s It’s Complicated with so many annotations by others. It is quite refreshing to see a relatively high level of work and commentary on a piece (compared to the typical dreck that one can find in most online newspapers’ comments sections.)  I suspect that for some performative nature may come into play, but I find this less of a factor on more scholarly facing platforms like Hypothesis (compared to Genius.com or Twitter). Certainly one can get caught up in the idea of becoming famous or popular for their commentary.

As boyd points out in the introduction to her book, this sort of thing seems to be common human nature:

None of the videos they made were of especially high quality, and while they shared them publicly on YouTube, only their friends watched them. Still, whenever they got an additional view—even if only because they forced a friend to watch the video—they got excited.

In the end, some of it may come down to audience. For whom are you writing, annotating, or working?  The vast majority of the time, I’m writing and documenting for myself. Anyone else that stumbles upon the conversation may hopefully only make it more interesting, but as often as not, except for an occasional class no one notices–and even then they may not publicly comment.

As for boyd’s book, I’m somewhat less than impressed. I’m aware of much of her work and appreciate the role she plays in the broader public conversation, but I’ve been far too close to the topic she’s writing about for far too long. I view it in a somewhat more historical framework and slightly different viewpoint than she. As a result, she’s not telling me much I didn’t already know or haven’t thought about for quite  a while. I suspect that my commentary in my annotations may make this a bit more clear.