Gardner Campbell of Virginia Commonwealth University keynotes the seventh annual I Annotate gathering in Washington DC, focused on the theme Annotation Unleashed: The Web at 30. Note well. Take note. Make a note. Leave a mark. Annotation, learning, teaching, and human flourishing are all deeply intertwingled. I’ll explore some of these connections, with illustrations from my use of annotation in the classroom as well as in my work with Doug Engelbart’s 1962 research report and manifesto, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Along the way, I’ll consider the central question Shoshana Zuboff poses in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: “Can the digital future be our home?” Or will it be a place of exile? View Gardner's slides: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1C63... Explore #ianno19: https://iannotate.org/2019/
Thank you to Gardner himself for working to create this final edited version of his presentation!
Tag: Hypothes.is
We invite you use this collaborative bibliography on annotation, curated by members of AnnotatED, the community for annotation in education that includes educators, researchers, and technologists from organizations that engage deeply with collaborative annotation as a transformative practice in teaching and learning.
You can also visit a filtered view of the full bibliography that includes only scholarship specifically related to Hypothesis and the full bibliography directly in Zotero. Contact us to make suggestions or join as a contributor.
A coalition of content creators, technology platforms, service providers and stakeholder groups in education coming together to achieve the first steps for cross-platform social learning.
The list of participants could definitely use some more diversity.
It’s also sort of founding example for the idea of social annotation given that most prior annotation was for personal use. (Though Owen Gingerich has shown that early annotations were copied from book to book and early scribes added annotations to texts for readers as well.)
It also demonstrates the idea of proof of work (in this case love “work”), which is part of the reason that social annotation in an educational setting using tools like Hypothes.is is worthwhile. Students are indicating (via social signaling) to a teacher that they’ve read and actively engaged with the course material.
Of course, unlike the example, they’re not necessarily showing “true love” of the material!
Thanks to all who joined the session on @hypothes_is for @SDCCD DE week!
— Mary Klann, PhD (@mcklann) April 22, 2021
My slides from the workshop are available here: https://t.co/072Ns7JgKH. (Hypothesis enabled for annotation!)
(All conversations I've been having lately about teaching eventually lead to #ungrading.) pic.twitter.com/r9NpSQ7Vub
My take is that the web could feel warmer and more lively than it is. Visiting a webpage could feel a little more like visiting a park and watching the world go by. Visiting my homepage could feel just a tiny bit like stopping by my home. And so to celebrate my blogging streak reaching one year, this week, I’m adding a proof of concept to my blog, something I’m provisionally calling Social Attention.
If somebody else selects some text, it’ll be highlighted for you. ❧
Suddenly social annotation has taken an interesting twist. @Hypothes_is better watch out! 😉
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:03AM
How often have you been on the phone with a friend, trying to describe how to get somewhere online? Okay go to Amazon. Okay type in “whatever”. Okay, it’s the third one down for me…
This is ridiculous!
What if, instead, you both went to the website and then you could just say: follow me. ❧
There are definitely some great use cases for this.
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:05AM
A status emoji will appear in the top right corner of your browser. If it’s smiling, there are other people on the site right now too. ❧
This is pretty cool looking. I’ll have to add it as an example to my list: Social Reading User Interface for Discovery.
We definitely need more things like this on the web.
It makes me wish the Reading.am indicator were there without needing to click on it.
I wonder how this sort of activity might be built into social readers as well?
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:13AM
If I’m in a meeting, I should be able to share a link in the chat to a particular post on my blog, then select the paragraph I’m talking about and have it highlighted for everyone. Well, now I can. ❧
And you could go a few feet farther if you added [fragment](https://indieweb.org/fragmention) support to the site, then the browser would also autoscroll to that part. Then you could add a confetti cannon to the system and have the page rain down confetti when more than three people have highlighted the same section!
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:18AM
I want the patina of fingerprints, the quiet and comfortable background hum of a library. ❧
A great thing to want on a website! A tiny hint of phatic interaction amongst internet denizens.
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:20AM
What I’d like more of is a social web that sits between these two extremes, something with a small town feel. So you can see people are around, and you can give directions and a friendly nod, but there’s no need to stop and chat, and it’s not in your face. It’s what I’ve talked about before as social peripheral vision (that post is about why it should be build into the OS). ❧
I love the idea of social peripheral vision online.
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:22AM
streak: New posts for 52 consecutive weeks. ❧
It’s kind of cool that he’s got a streak counter for his posts.
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:24AM
Hypothes.is as a comment system: Receiving @mentions and notifications for your website
I was reminded today that one can subscribe to an RSS/ATOM feed of annotations on their site (or any site for that matter) using the feed format https://hypothes.is/stream.rss?wildcard_uri=https://www.example.org/*
and replacing the example.org URL with the desired one. Nota bene: the /* at the end makes the query a wildcard to find anything on your site. If you leave it off you’ll only get the annotations on your homepage.
If you’re using Hypothes.is in an off-label use case Tom Critchlow and CJ Eller trying this out in the past.
on your website, this can be invaluable. I recallTo go a step further, one can also use this scheme to get a feed of @mentions of their Hypothes.is username too. If I’m not mistaken, based on some preliminary tests, this method should work for finding username
both with and without the @
being included.
These are a few interesting tidbits for those who are using Hypothes.is not only for the social annotation functionality, but as a social media site or dovetailing it with their own websites and related workflows.
A reflection on annotations and context at OLC Innovate & Liquid Margins
Reviewing over some notes, I’m glad I took a moment to annotate the context in which I made my annotations, which are very meta with respect to that context. Others’ annotations were obviously from the context of educators looking at Hughes’ work from the perspective of teachers looking back at an earlier time.
I’ve just gone back and not only re-read the poem, but read through and responded to some of the other annotations asynchronously. The majority of today’s annotations were made synchronously during the session. Others reading and interpreting them may be helped to know which were synchronous or asynchronous and from which contexts people were meeting the text. There were many annotations from prior dates that weren’t in the cohort of those found today. It would be interesting if the Hypothes.is UI had some better means of indicating time periods of annotation.
Is anyone studying these contextual aspects of digital annotation? I’ve come across some scholarship of commonplace books that attempt to contextualize notes within their historic time periods, but most of those attempts don’t have the fidelity of date and timestamps that Hypothes.is does. In fact, many of those attempts have no dates at all other than that they may have been made +/- a decade or two, which tends to cause some context collapse.
Crowdlaaers may provide some structure for studying these sorts of phenomenon: https://crowdlaaers.org?url=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47880/theme-for-english-b. It provides some time-based tools for viewing annotations to help provide context. Looking at it’s data, I’m particularly struck by how few people today took advantage of the ability to use taxonomies.
As always, it was fun to see and hear about some uses of annotation using Hypothes.is in the wild. Thanks again to Nate Angell, Remi Kalir, Jeremy Dean, and all of the other panelists and participants who spoke so well about how they’re using this tool.
How I use Hypothesis myself and with my students
Private groups are also my solution to the potential “saturation” problem that many people have asked me about. I DO think that there’s a potential disincentive to students who I’ve asked to annotate a document, if they open it and find hundreds of comments already there. I already face a situation when I post questions for discussion that people answer in a visible way, where some students say their peers have already made the point they were going to make. It’s easier to address this objection, I think, when EVERY LINE of a document isn’t already yellow! ❧
I’ve run into this issue myself in a few public instances. I look at my annotations as my own “conversation” with a document. Given this, I usually flip the switch to hide all the annotations on the page and annotate for myself. Afterwards I’ll then turn the annotation view back on and see and potentially interact with others if I choose.
Annotated on February 23, 2021 at 10:28PM
Small world of annotation enthusiasts, but hopefully getting bigger! ❧
I’ve always wished that Hypothes.is had some additional social features built in for discovering and following others, but they do have just enough for those who are diligent.
I’ve written a bit about [how to follow folks and tags using a feed reader](https://boffosocko.com/2019/11/07/following-people-on-hypothesis/).
And if you want some quick links or even an OPML feed of people and material I’m following on Hypothesis: [https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds](https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds)
Annotated on February 23, 2021 at 11:33PM
👋
Annotated on February 23, 2021 at 11:35PM
Hypothesis caching the same post title for all annotations on a single site
Steps to reproduce
- Annotate any page on https://boffosocko.com
- View https://hypothes.is/search?q=url%3Aboffosocko.com%2F*
Expected behaviour
I would expect the titles of the various annotated posts displayed on H to be that of the <h1> tag on the annotated page or some other logical name based on a parsing algorithm.
Actual behaviour
The titles for almost all the annotations on my website (since 2016), regardless of the page they’re on, appear to be the incorrect title: “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015: Indie Ed-Tech”. The few exceptions seem to be the self-hosted .pdf files on my domain/storage that I’ve annotated.
Browser/system information
This appears to be browser and OS independent
Additional details
The only post on my website related to the title which appears seems to be https://boffosocko.com/2020/05/16/top-ed-tech-trends-of-2015-indie-ed-tech-audrey-watters/ which contains copies of the annotations I made on Audrey Waters’ page. See: http://hackeducation.com/2015/12/21/trends-indie#annotations:soppjJeoEeq9gccaKJdTtg
Some time around 2016 Audrey disabled annotations on her site (due to abuse, though it appears she’s since re-enabled them?). Is it possible that the H client has somehow cached the title of her post and is somehow mapping it as the title for all of the annotations made on my site? Having looked at the pages which have been annotated on my site, there’s nothing hiding in or related to the the meta data or rel=”canonical” links that would indicate that they should have the titles that H is finding for them.
All browsers have a feature called "Bookmark This Page". It is essentially the same poor badly manageable tool on every browsers. If you do not want to rely on a third party service, or an addon, what the browser has to offer is not very satisfying.
Bookmark This Selection
What I would like from the bookmark feature in the browser is the ability to not only bookmark the full page but be able to select a piece of the page that is reflected in the bookmark, be through the normal menu as we have seen above or through the contextual menu of the browser. ❧
Sounds kind of like they’re wishing for Hypothes.is?
Annotated on February 19, 2021 at 09:47PM
And yes, some add-ons exist, but I just wish the feature was native to the browser. And I do not want to rely on a third party service. My quotes are mine only and should not necessary be shared with a server on someone’s else machine. ❧
Ownership of the data is important. One could certainly set up their own Hypothes.is server if they liked.
I personally take the data from my own Hypothes.is account and dump it into my local Obsidian.md vault for saving, crosslinking, and further thought. Other portions go to my personal website for archiving and public display/consumption as well.
Annotated on February 19, 2021 at 09:50PM
How can I also connect this to the Jeremy Dean‘s idea of it helping to facilitate a conversation with texts. Nate Angell had a specific quote/annotation of it somewhere, but it might also reside in this document: Web Annotation as Conversation and Interruption.
I’m watching this with high hopes something similar would work with @obsdmd. Come to think if it, if such an app were a Micropub client and these platforms all supported publishing via Micropub, then the one application would work across more platforms.
Wikilinks everywhere: a web extension/library/bookmarklet that eagerly or lazily resolves [[wikilinks]] in any web property within a user-chosen context, e.g. an Agora or other distributed knowledge graph.
A Firefox and Google Chrome extension to clip websites and download them into a readable markdown file. - deathau/markdownload
I had MarkDownload installed in Chrome before and had used it a bit. Spent some time tonight and did some custom configuration in the settings to make it easier to save web pages directly to my Obsidian commonplace book. This can be an interesting method for quickly saving and linking lots of data, though it also means saving a lot more than may be strictly necessary, particularly at scale. I’m still not giving up on my Hypothes.is methods though.
Once configured for Obsidian, MarkDownload can be a very powerful tool.