715 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2022
    1. You could imagine employers shipping corporate laptops with pre-installed notes to make it easier to transfer (previously tacit) knowledge and thus improve the onboarding process for new hires.

      Using Hypothes.is as an annotation layer for internal company notes in a private space could be an interesting way for easing on-boarding.

      In some sense, this is a little bit of what the annotated syllabus is doing for students at the beginning of a course (in addition to helping to onboard them to the idea of social annotation at the same time.)

    2. Together, post-its essentially become a notes layer that augments the real world.

      Annotations on Post-It Notes are a form of augmented reality.

  2. Dec 2021
    1. Marginalia

      With Webmention support, one could architect a site to allow inline marginalia and highlighting similar to Medium.com’s relatively well-known functionality. With the clever use of URL fragments, which are well supported in major browsers, there are already examples of people who use Webmentions to display word-, sentence-, or paragraph-level marginalia on their sites. After all, aren’t inline annotations just a more targeted version of comments?

      <figure> Screencapture from Medium.com with an example of an inline response. <figcaption>An inline annotation on the text “Hey Ev, what about mentions?” in which Medium began to roll out their @mention functionality.</figcaption> </figure>
    1. The main feature of iA Writer is not having many features. The program is, essentially, a white rectangle, where the user can do little else but type in a custom monospaced font. There are no headers, footers, drawing tools, or chatty paper-clip assistants. The bare-bones interface uses special characters in a simple formatting language called Markdown to bold, italicize, or otherwise transform text—a way of encouraging writers to keep their hands on the keyboard and their minds on their work.

      Using a completely blank page as the start of any creative endeavor is a miserable choice for writing. Start with some other object and annotate either on it or next to it. Look at something else as a base. Starting with blank nothing is a recipe for loneliness and disaster. So-called distraction free writing tools are the worst.

      Didn't Ernest Hemmingway analogize staring at a blank page like facing a white bull? There is a litany of quotes about writers facing the blank page.

      Why not, instead, use the advice of ancient rhetors by starting with the best? Become a bee and collect the best materials for your honey first. If we don't look to them, then perhaps follow the lesson taught by Benjamin Franklin on writing or the same lesson repeated in the movie Finding Forrester. Start with someone else's work and rewrite that until you find your own words. This is what makes writing while annotating so easy and simple. You've got a nice tapestry of textures to begin your work.

      Giving birth to something fully formed as if from the head of Zeus is a fallacy. It only works for the gods.

    1. The Annodex annotation format for time-continuous bitstreams, Version 2.0 draft-pfeiffer-annodex-01

      Abstract

      This specification defines a file format for annotating and indexing time-continuous bitstreams for the World Wide Web. The format has been named "Annodex" for annotating and indexing. The Annodex format enables the specification of named anchor points in time-continuous bitstreams together with textual annotations and hyperlinks in URI [4] format. These anchor points are merged time-synchronously with the time-continuous bitstreams when authoring a file in Annodex format. The ultimate aim of the Annodex format is to enable an integration of time-continous bitstreams into the browsing and searching functionality of the World Wide Web.

    1. JCDL 2010 presentation about using Memento to reconstruct the state for web resources involved in annotation.
    1. Plus you can scan text with your camera and create highlights from physical books.

      This is exciting!

    1. {
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        "updated": "2014-09-18T21:43:16.353744+00:00",
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        "text": "As featured in \"Weaving the Web\" by Tim Berners-Lee",
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    1. dokieli is a clientside editor for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions.
  3. Nov 2021
    1. https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.edutopia.org/article/social-annotation-digital-age

      a teaser article for social annotation. only scratches the surface.

    2. As the book recounts, annotation is a centuries-old practice. For example, decorative images called drolleries were added in the margins of medieval texts as visual comments on themes in the text.

      I've not seen it argued elsewhere (yet), but I would make a case that the majority of drolleries weren't so much comment on themes in text as that they were loci placed into the books at either intervals or in particular locations as part of the practice of the art of memory. They act as signposts to which the reader can more easily memorize portions of books by attaching the ideas on those pages to the dramatic and absurd images painted into them as suggested by Rhetorica ad Herennium (https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL403/1954/volume.xml).

      Cross reference: The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates (University of Chicago, 1966).for the historical practice of memory in the West, though she doesn't mention drolleries at all.

      cc: @remikalir

    1. wn a looser sense the term is also used to designate notes of any kindW as in the tdvY shelfmark inthe qambridge ˆniversity zibrary reserved for books containing marginal annotationsi see ̧illiam vY `hermanW –ohn weem The Politics of Reading and Writing in the xnglish RenaissanceSomherstW ffassYW ]ggcTW ppY dc–ddY

      "Adv." (standing for adversaria) is a shelfmark in the Cambridge University Library that is used for books which contain marginal annotations.

    2. ut personal notes can also be shared with othersWon a limited scale with family and friends and on a wider scale throughpublicationW notably in genres that compile useful reading notes for othersY

      Written in 2004, this is on the cusp of the growth of blogging and obviously predates the general time frame of social media and the rise of social annotation. Personal notes can now be shared more widely and have much larger publics.

  4. Oct 2021
    1. sometimes you de- yelop a whole passage, not with the intention of completing it, but because it comes of itself and because inspiration is like grace, which passes by and does not come back.

      So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.

      I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.

      These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.

      Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.

      Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.

      This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.

      Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.

      I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.

      With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.

      With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.

      I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.

      I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.

      We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?

      How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?

    1. NetInteraktive Dokumente

      Net-Interactive Documents is another system to add annotation in a repository context. It allows addition of multimedia contents as annotations Try the system at https://nid.iicm.tugraz.at/

    1. We do, even asking in our conclusion, “How might the social life of annotation serve the public good?” Any social benefit mediated by annotation must address power.

      The parallel structure here reminds me of the book The Social Life of Information which is surely related to this idea in a subtle way. I wonder if they cited it in their bibliography? I wonder if it influenced this sentence?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Life_of_Information

    2. example from your colleague, Victor Lee. We began a recent talk about Annotation.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(57, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }1Remi Kalir with Victor’s tweet. His perspective on access, ownership, and power helped us to discuss a tension between readers who can and do write annotation —whether in books or the built environment— and the cultural rites of annotation, often unwritten, that also constrain where and how notes are added to everyday texts.

      Ipsa annotātiō potestas est.

      (Annotation is power.)

    3. For academics, annotation is also essential to scholarly communication and knowledge production. With Annotation, we eagerly accepted a social and scholarly responsibility to spark, curate, and facilitate discussion about annotation.

      The tools for thought crowd should all be reading Kalir and Garcia's book Annotation.

    1. The annotation functionality is enabled by Hypothes.is.

      Drag and drop a document to annotate it.

      Gien Wong mentioned a tool that Gyuri is using to annotate videos. Is this it?

    1. social annotation

      Had I known about Hypothesis at the time of my collaboration with Ilaria Forte, I likely would have suggested this as a tool for documenting the stream of consciousness, collecting stories in the context of the media that people are experiencing on the web.

  5. www.programmableweb.com www.programmableweb.com
    1. Hypothesis REST API

      The Hypothesis API integrates annotations into web services. Available to send HTTP requests and JSON responses, it aims to be useful for researchers, scientists, and educators.

    1. Private links One must be able to add one's own private links to and from public information. One must also be able to annotate links, as well as nodes, privately.
  6. Sep 2021
    1. From a media point of view, Genius was offensive for its initial underlying claim: that it was okay to take anyone’s content for zero compensation, so long as it “added transformative value” by tacking on a comment box where people could say it sucked.

      Hot take 🔥

    1. So do all manner of other peculiarities of form, including notations of editions on the verso (the flip side) of the full title page and the running headers all throughout that rename the book you are already reading.

      I do dislike the running headers of digital copies of books as most annotation tools want to capture those headers in the annotation.

      It would be nice if they were marked up in an Aria-like method so that annotation software would semantically know to ignore them.

    2. The iPad’s larger screen also scales down PDF pages to fit, making the results smaller than they would be in print. It also displays simulated print margins inside the bezel margin of the device itself, a kind of mise en abyme that still can’t actually be used for the things margins are used for, such as notes or dog-ears.

      It would be quite nice if a digital reader would allow actual writing in the margins, or even overlaying the text itself and then allowing the looking at the two separately.

      I do quite like the infinite annotation space that Hypothes.is gives me on a laptop. I wish there were UI for it on a Kindle in a more usable and forgiving way. The digital keyboard on Kindle Paperwhite is miserable. I've noticed that I generally prefer reading and annotating on desktop in a browser now for general ease-of-use.

      Also, I don't see enough use of mise en abyme. This is a good one.

      In Western art history, mise en abyme (French pronunciation: ​[miz ɑ̃n‿abim]; also mise en abîme) is a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence. In film theory and literary theory, it refers to the technique of inserting a story within a story. The term is derived from heraldry and literally means "placed into abyss". It was first appropriated for modern criticism by the French author André Gide.

    3. In other words, as far as technologies go, the book endures for very good reason. Books work.

      Aside from reading words to put ideas into my brain, one of the reasons I like to read digital words is that the bigger value proposition for me is an easier method to add annotations to what I'm reading and then to be able to manipulate those notes after-the-fact. I've transcended books and the manual methods of note taking. Until I come up with a better word for it, digital commonplacing seems to be a useful shorthand for this new pattern of reading.

    1. The

      Questions the class came up with: Are they making more money off of vapes than they are cigarettes? Why aren't the stores IDing people like they do cigarettes? Why aren't these products banned if they are so harmful? Is there is a difference between a vape and e-cigarettes, or is it just a different name? Do certain vapes have more nicotine than others? Than cigarettes? Why don't they ban regular tobacco instead of e-cigarettes if e-cigarettes are safer than regular tobacco ?

    1. How to Use These Ideas

      I love that he's not only externalized his thoughts from the book as annotations/notes and then synthesized them into a longer essay, but he's further expanded and externalized them by thinking about how to put them to use!

    2. Then, later, when I had finished reading the book, I went back and wrote notes on each of the Post-Its. (Since I put notes on nearly every page of the book, I needed some easy way to find the information I might want in the future.) Doing so required me to reread the passage I put the note on, and then to figure out what about it had caught my eye, then to come up with a few words to put on the note. This is generally how I annotate books I read, but in this case I was also, inadvertently, demonstrating a couple of the book’s principle ideas: most people learn and remember best when they can turn their knowledge into artifacts, give it some physical presence, and make their attention (and memory) loop through information recursively rather than trying to learn in a linear way.

      Matthew Cheney has a slightly different method of annotating books. He marks the pages/sections, but then revisits them afterwards to add notes.

      However one does this, a lot of the power is in actually revisiting one's notes and thoughts and doing two things, reviewing them, extending them, and saving them for later use and review.

    1. Each was a small library in its own right, with slabs of text arranged in monumental double columns. The Great Books of the Western World were what books should not be: an antidote to pleasure.

      This reminds me that books should have massively larger margins for writing notes.

    1. https://jrdingwall.ca/blogwall/25-years-of-ed-tech-blogs/

      JR writes about some of his journey into blogging.

      I appreciate some of the last part about the 9x9x25 blogs. For JR it seems like some smaller prompts got him into more regular writing.

      He mentions Stephen Downes regular workflow as well. I think mine is fairly similar to Stephen's. To some extent, I write much more on my own website now than I ever had before. This is because I post a lot more frequently to my own site, in part because it's just so easy to do. I'll bookmark things or post about what I've recently read or watched. My short commentary on some of these is just that, short commentary. But occasionally I discover, depending on the subject, that those short notes and bookmark posts will spring into something bigger or larger. Sometimes it's a handful of small posts over a few days or weeks that ultimately inspires the longer thing. The key seems to be to write something.

      Perhaps a snowball analogy will work. I take a tiny snowball and give it a proverbial roll. Sometimes it sits there and other times it rolls down the hill and turns into a much larger snowball. Other times I get a group of them and build a full snowman.

      Of course lately a lot of my writing starts, like this did, as an annotation (using Hypothes.is) to something I was reading. It then posts to my website with some context and we're off to the races.

    1. Most of us were taught as children to treat books as something sacred—no folding the page corners, and no writing in the margins, ever.

      Most Medieval manuscripts specifically left wide columns of space to encourage readers to mark up their texts.

      cross reference: Medieval notepads - Khan Academy

      <small>Detail, London, British Library, Harley MS 3487 (13th century)—[source](http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=16790)</small>

    2. Jot down connections and tangential thoughts, underline key passages, and make a habit of building a dialogue with the author(s).

      Some people consider annotations to be a conversation with the author. But you're also having a conversation with yourself and your own thoughts. (Cross reference Niklas Luhmann's having a conversation with himself via his notes.)

      Further, there are platforms like Hypothes.is or social platforms like Twitter where you can move the conversation out of the page and engage with others. However, for this Hypothes.is has more power because it keeps the conversation linked to the original text and the original context (which I'll explicitly translate here as "with the text") to underline the point.

      cf:

      cum (Latin) : with

      textus (Latin) : tissue, web, texture, fabric, connection, language

      contextus (Latin) : context, connection, coherence, connexion, coherency, text

  7. Aug 2021
    1. This specific style of presenting two works on the one page, where the glosses (commentary) are presented as “square brackets”, is called textus inclusus.
    2. The most common and sensible location for putting down thoughts, critique or notes was the margin of the medieval book. Consider this: you wouldn’t think so looking at a medieval page, but on average only half of it was filled with the actual text. A shocking fifty to sixty percent was designed to be margin. As inefficient as this may seem, the space came in handy for the reader. As the Middle Ages progressed it became more and more common to resort to the margin for note-taking.
    3. Connecting a marginal remark to the relevant passage in the text was usually done with a duplicated symbol, called a signe de renvoi: one was placed in front of the marginal note, the other near the word or passage that the remark commented upon.

      Evolution of footnotes

    1. Interestingly, while the dragon could easily have been doodled by the reader himself, the depictions seen in Fig. 8 are carefully designed and painted. These pointing hands – the manuscript contains many of them – were probably done professionally. If this inference is correct, it suggests that the reader asked the artisan to insert them during production. This is interesting because it means that the reader already knew what passages he would wanted to have highlighted. It appears he already knew the text well before he owned a copy.

      Professionally designed, drawn, and painted manicules may be an indicator that the reader knew a text well prior to commissioning a copy of a manuscript being made.

    1. Media and the Mind: Art, Science and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 550 pp + 60 figures.

      I can't wait to read Media and the Mind: Art, Science and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)!

      I see some bits on annotation hiding in here that may be of interest to @RemiKalir and @anterobot.

      If you need some additional eyeballs on it prior to publication, I'm happy to mark it up in exchange for the early look.

    1. If this blog had a tagline it would be "an ongoing conversation with myself."

      Here's an example of a blogger using the idea of writing a blog as being in conversation with himself.

      It obviously doesn't predate Niklas Luhmann's conversation with slip boxes, but the general tenor is certainly similar in form and function.

    1. Fleeting notes while reading is your way of having a conversation with the author. It may not eventuate to anything but the process instantly places agency back in your hands.

      The idea of taking notes here as a conversation both with onesself as well as the author is essentially the old idea of making annotations in the margins of a book.

      He's repackaging it in the framing of a zettelkasten, but it's the same sort of conversation that @remikalir talks about, though in that case Remi is usually talking about class-wide group conversations with a text.

      Cross-reference this with Luhmann's paper Communicating with Slip-boxes which is a portion of the story from the zettelkasten perspective.

      Certainly someone in the commonplace or annotation traditions mentioned the idea of a conversation? Either with themselves, with the author, or with the text itself? Was this ever tacitly acknowledged before Luhmann?

    1. Type Annotations:These annotations can be applied to any place where a type is being used. For example, we can annotate the return type of a method.
    1. Rubyists don't call these things annotations. One of the things I like doing is to find common techniques that cross languages, for me this is a common technique and 'annotation' seems like a good generic word for it. I don't know if Rubyists will agree.
    1. Languages may provide annotations in ways that don't reflect the syntax of the language
    2. When writing about programming, I prefer to use 'annotation' as the general term. Although .NET was first, the word 'attribute' is just too widely used for different things.
    3. An annotation on a program element (commonly a class, method, or field) is a piece of meta-data added to that program element which can be used to embellish that element with extra code.
    1. The first step in translating experience, either of other men's writing, or of your own life, into the intellectual sphere, is to give it form. Merely to name an item of experience often invites you to explain it; the mere taking of a note from a book is often a prod to reflection. At the same time, of course, the taking of a note is a great aid in comprehending what you are reading.

      on the purpose of taking notes, annotating one's reading, or commonplacing

      highlight is a quote from

      C. Wright Mills' profound "Appendix: On Intellectual Craftsmanship," as found in his book on The Sociological Imagination.[16]

    2. Reading should never be merely passive and consist in the mere absorption or copying of information. It should be critical and engage the material reflectively, being guided by questions such as "Why is this important?" "How does this fit in?" "Is it true?" "Why is the author saying what she is saying?" etc.
    1. Müller-Wille and Scharf ‘Indexing Nature’, also points out that Linnaeus interleaved blanksheets into his texts so that he could take notes. Cooper points out that this had been a common practice in natural historysince at least the late seventeenth century (Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous, 74–5).

      Apparently interleaving blank sheets into texts was a more common practice than I had known! I've seen it in the context of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) using the practice to take notes in his Bible, but not in others.

    1. Luhmann also described his system as his secondary memory (Zweitgedächtnis), alter ego, or his reading memory or (Lesegedächtnis).

      Stumbled back upon this article almost a year and change later. Great to see that I'm at least consistent in what I would highlight. ;)

    1. I like the differentiation that Jared has made here on his homepage with categories for "fast" and "slow".

      It's reminiscent of the system 1 (fast) and system2 (slow) ideas behind Kahneman and Tversky's work in behavioral economics. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow)

      It's also interesting in light of this tweet which came up recently:

      I very much miss the back and forth with blog posts responding to blog posts, a slow moving argument where we had time to think.

      — Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) August 22, 2017
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Because the Tweet was shared out of context several years later, someone (accidentally?) replied to it as if it were contemporaneous. When called out for not watching the date of the post, their reply was "you do slow web your way…" #

      This gets one thinking. Perhaps it would help more people's contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating?). Sometimes the length of a response is an indicator of the thought put into it, thought not always as there's also the oft-quoted aphorism: "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter".

      The ease of use of the UI on Twitter seems to broadly make it a platform for "fast" posting which can often cause ruffled feathers, sour feelings, anger, and poor communication.

      What if there were posting UIs (or micropub clients) that would hold onto your responses for a few hours, days, or even a week and then remind you about them after that time had past to see if they were still worth posting? This is a feature based on Abraham Lincoln's idea of a "hot letter" or angry letter, which he advised people to write often, but never send.

      Where is the social media service for hot posts that save all your vituperation, but don't show them to anyone? Or which maybe posts them anonymously?

      The opposite of some of this are the partially baked or even fully thought out posts that one hears about anecdotally, but which the authors say they felt weren't finish and thus didn't publish them. Wouldn't it be better to hit publish on these than those nasty quick replies? How can we create UI for this?

      I saw a sitcom a few years ago where a girl admonished her friend (an oblivious boy) for liking really old Instagram posts of a girl he was interested in. She said that deep-liking old photos was an obvious and overt sign of flirting.

      If this is the case then there's obviously a social standard of sorts for this, so why not hold your tongue in the meanwhile, and come up with something more thought out to send your digital love to someone instead of providing a (knee-)jerk reaction?

      Of course now I can't help but think of the annotations I've been making in my copy of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. Do you suppose that Lucretius knows I'm in love?

  8. Jul 2021
    1. Highlight & share the best moments from podcasts

      This could be interesting for annotating and sharing data from podcasting. Sadly nothing for Android yet.

      via https://youtu.be/wB89lJs5A3s?t=8126

    1. It is certainly important that we possess one text from Anaximander’s book. On the other hand, we must recognize that we know hardly anything of its original context, as the rest of the book has been lost. We do not know from which part of his book it is, nor whether it is a text the author himself thought crucial or just a line that caught one reader’s attention as an example of Anaximander’s poetic writing style.

      This is one of the first (existing) annotations in Western culture. One must be careful however as the context of the rest is missing.

      What techniques might we use to help rebuild the context? What would Bart Ehrman's text suggest?

    1. Titi Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri SexWith a Translation and NotesVolume 1Edited by H. A. J. Munro Lucretius

      Testing out the OCR functionality of docdrop.org.

      I'm noticing that the pdf fingerprint of this text somehow matches that of other texts as there are a lot of non-related annotations on this page.

      Is docdrop doing something squirrelly with the fingerprint @dwhly?

    1. I'm particularly interested here in the idea of interleaved books for additional marginalia. Thanks for the details!

      An aspect that's missing from the overall discussion here is that of the commonplace book. Edwards' Miscellanies is a classic example of the Western note taking and idea collecting tradition of commonplace books.

      While the name for his system is unique, his note taking method was assuredly not. The bigger idea goes back to ancient Greece and Rome with Aristotle and Cicero and continues up to the modern day.

      From roughly 900-1300 theologians and preachers also had a sub-genre of this category called florilegia. In the Christian religious tradition Philip Melanchthon has one of the more influential works on the system: De locis communibus ratio (1539).

      You might appreciate this article on some of the tradition: https://blog.cph.org/study/systematic-theology-and-apologetics/why-are-so-many-great-lutheran-books-called-commonplaces-or-loci

      You'll find Edwards' and your indexing system bears a striking resemblance to that of philosopher John Locke, (yes that Locke!): https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685

    2. Those interested in reading the contents of Edwards’ Blank Bible can either purchase the Yale print edition or read it online here. 

      Copies of print and digital editions of Jonathan Edwards' blank Bible are available.

      Apparently one can buy modern copies of interleaved bibles as well: https://www.amazon.com/Interleaved-Journal-Hardcover-Letter-Comfort/dp/078524316X/

      Video review of an interleaved bible:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6EAu3nB1vk

      What other books can be found in interleaved editions? Ayn Rand perhaps?

    3. Jonathan Edwards’s so-called “Blank Bible.” JE received as a gift from Benjamin Pierpoint, his brother in law, a unique book. Structurally, it is a strange animal. It is a small, double-column King James, unstitched and then spliced back together again inside a large blank journal. The result is a one-of-a-kind Bible that has an empty sheet between every page of Scripture text. 

      If one is serious about annotating a text, then consider making a "blank Bible" version of it.

      Jonathan Edwards apparently received bible as a gift. It had a copy of the text of the bible which interspersed blank pages between every page of text thereby allowing massive amounts of space for marginalia!

    1. Best Bible Note-Taking System: Jonathan Edwards's Miscellanies

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqq-4-LiFVs

      Overview of Jonathan Edwards Miscellanies system along with a a few wide-margin bibles. Everhard apparently hasn't heard of the commonplace concept, though I do notice that someone mentions the zettelkasten system in the comments.

  9. Jun 2021
    1. But here's the twist. That edit window is wired to your personal cloud. That's where your words land. Then you syndicate your words back to the site you're posting to.

      This is more or less how linked data notifications work. (And Solid, of course, goes beyond that.)

    2. If they did I think there would actually be some quality of discussion, and it might be useful

      I used to think this. (That isn't to say I've changed my mind. I'm just not convinced one way or the other.)

      Another foreseeable outcome, relative to the time when the friend here was making the comment, is that it would lead to people being nastier in real life. Whether that's true or not (and I think that it might be), Twitter has turned out to be a cesspool, and it has shown us that people are willing to engage in all sorts of nastiness under their real name.

    1. But it quickly began to feel, for me, like something more intense: a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane.

      Mingling with the author has a pleasant ring to it. Better than a "conversation with the text"? Definitely has a nicer warmth.

      He could have replace plane with something warmer as well.


      This is related in a way with the way [[Niklas Luhmann]] spoke about communicating with his [[Zettelkasten]] as means of collaborating. (See: http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes)

    2. The fresh one, she told me afterward, felt a little lonely by comparison: she missed the meta-conversation running in the margins, the sense of another consciousness co-filtering D.F.W.’s words, the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes.

      There is definitely an art to writing interesting marginalia however. Perhaps something that requires practice?

      Sam Anderson's would be intriguing I'm sure. Dick Macksey's marvelous. Anderson provides the example of people wanting books from [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]] earlier in the piece.

      I can only contrast this with some of the crazy minutiae an pedantry I've seen on Hypothes.is which makes me think that it's surely an art form.

      I suspect some of it is that I'm missing the personal context with a particular person---a sense of continuity. Things get even worse when it's a piece annotated by a class which can create a cacophony of annotations. I see far too many "me too" annotations floating around in the margins that don't add anything to the conversation. (Hopefully I'm not guilty of this sin myself, but really, even my public annotations are a conversation between me and a piece and are only for my own benefit.)

    3. What I really want is someone rolling around in the text. I want noticing. I want, in short, marginalia, everywhere, all the time. Suddenly that seems deliriously possible.

      The dream of us all...

    4. I’ve long been frustrated with the “distance” between criticism and reading itself. Most critical energy is expended in big-picture work — situating texts in history, talking about broad themes — all of which is useful but hardly touches the excitement of actual reading, a process of discovery that happens in time, moment by moment, line by line.

      An interesting critique on criticism.

    5. Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions.
    6. Now, when the Coleridge of 21st-century marginalia emerges, he should be able to mark up the books of a million friends at once.

      This could be an interesting service to set up and run.

      I wonder if I could set up a private Hypothes.is group and actually charge a club rate to members for doing such a thing?

    7. This, it seems to me, would be something like a readerly utopia. It could even (if we want to get all grand and optimistic) turn out to be a Gutenberg-style revolution — not for writing, this time, but for reading.

      I love the idea of this but implementation, particularly open implementation seems nearly impossible.

      Even getting digital commonplaces to align and register is tough enough much less doing multi-modal registration with the locations that books might live.

    8. Or imagine you’re reading a particularly thorny passage of “Paradise Lost” and suddenly — zwang! — up pops marginalia from a few centuries of poets (Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Emerson, Eliot, Pound), with their actual handwriting superimposed on the text in front of you.

      I do remember a scholarly platform at Harvard that was trying to build something like this for academics. It was quite beautiful, but never really got out of the gate.

    9. Last month, Amazon announced what could be a landmark in electronic marginalia: public note sharing for the Kindle

      A decade on, I'm sorry to say that it has some useful features, but doesn't have a very usable UI or any worthwhile discovery. Lack of broad use and support prevents it from being as useful as it might.

      I can't really follow the annotations of anyone I might like to and finding any at all can be a bear.

    10. This gave me an epiphany — a grand vision of the future of social reading. I imagined a stack of transparent, margin-size plastic strips containing all of my notes from “Infinite Jest.” These, I thought, could be passed out to my friends, who would paste them into their own copies of the book and then, in turn, give me their marginalia strips, which I would paste into my copy, and we’d all have a big virtual orgy of never-ending literary communion.It was a hopelessly clunky idea: a vision right out of a Library Science seminar circa 1949.

      Goofy as this physical version sounds, I could imagine a digital overlay version that could go along with digital books in much the same way that Google Maps has digital overlays.

      The problem lies with registration and location of words to do the overlay properly. The UI would also be a major bear.

      Hypothes.is has really done a spectacular job in their version, the only issue is that it requires doing it all in a browser and isn't easily usable in any e-readers.

    11. Yet books are curious objects: their strength is to be both intensely private and intensely social — and marginalia is a natural bridge between these two states.

      Books represent a dichotomy in being both intensely private and intensely social at the same time.

      Are there other objects that have this property?

      Books also have the quality of providing people with identities.

    12. According to the marginalia scholar H. J. Jackson, the golden age of marginalia lasted from roughly 1700 to 1820.
    13. Writing in them is the closest I come to regular meditation; marginalia is — no exaggeration — possibly the most pleasurable thing I do on a daily basis.

      Annotation can be creative and fun. Doing it not only increases one's engagement with a text, but it helps to create flow in one's work.

    14. This wasn’t exactly radical behavior — marking up books, I’m pretty sure, is one of the Seven Undying Cornerstones of Highly Effective College Studying.

      Annotating books provides a way of creating modality shifts from the original form into others, and this is likely one of the reasons that it's an effective thinking, learning, and study tool.

    15. The author argued that you didn’t truly own a book (spiritually, intellectually) until you had marked it up.

      sentiment from “How to Read a Book.”

      Pull out the original quote of this.


      Note also that [[Mortimer J. Adler]] is saying this in a time period where books are far cheaper than in the past. An author from a few generations prior would have indicated that the quotes and marginalia should have gone in one's commonplace book.

    1. #AnnoConvo: A Conversation about Annotation, Literacy, and Learning
    2. I Annotate 2021 the conference for open annotation practices and technologies

      I can't wait to catch I Annotate 2021 starting tomorrow morning.


      Syndicated to:

  10. booktraces-public.lib.virginia.edu booktraces-public.lib.virginia.edu
    1. Thousands of old library books bear fascinating traces of the past. Readers wrote in their books, and left pictures, letters, flowers, locks of hair, and other things between their pages. We need your help identifying them in the stacks of academic libraries. Together we can find out more about what books were and how they were used by their original owners, while also proving the value of maintaining rich print collections in our libraries.

      A cool looking website focused around curating an interesting collection of books.

      Mentioned by Nate Angell at I Annotate 2021.

    1. I feel like I may have just stumbled on a back alley book club on design.

      It's digital books+Hypothes.is+Fight Club...

      The rules of Back Alley Book Club:

      1. We don't talk about Back Alley Book Club.
      2. We don't talk about Back Alley Book Club.

      ...

      1. If this is your first night at Back Alley Book Club, you have to annotate.

    1. The project will be available in summer 2021 on labs.loc.gov.

      Return to this project in July 2021 to see it in action.

    2. These markings sometimes shed light on the story of how a work was made or received. Researchers can understand more about the creative process, opinions and musings of people throughout the centuries by understanding these historical markings that are often, literally and figuratively, in the margins.

      In addition to looking in the margins, one must also look at contemporaneous copies of both printed and privately held (or collected) commonplace books to cast a wider net on these practices.

    3. doodles
    1. Write and cite, research and re-search, and never get lost in Databyss. Welcome to your new word processor.

      Ran across this in the closing party session of IAnno21.

    1. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.

      My own intellectual vibrations are ensconced into the annotations I make as I read.

      I'm curious how this habit will change my thinking over time.

    2. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

      Computer and phone notifications can be insidious. I've personally turned most of them off.

      I also find that reading and annotating with Hypothes.is has helped me to have more focus while reading---even despite the short turnoffs to cogitate a bit, write a bit, and then return.

    1. Lynne Kelly's observation that oral cultures revised useful knowledge into their memories appears to me to be a simple precursor to annotation and the idea of the scientific method all in one...

    2. It is literally and figuratively marginal.

      There is, however, an exceptionally long tradition of moving one's annotations out of the margins and into more expansive spaces like commonplace books, zettelkasten, wikis, Memex, and digital gardens...

      This cultural thinking pattern also isn't confined by literacy either. Dr. Lynne Kelly attests the idea of the storage of ideas and their subsequent potential revision in oral cultures in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. One may have lost the ability to track the original ideas in time, but the (useful) oral "annotations" were aggregated into cultural knowledge over time.

  11. May 2021
    1. Extracting .pdf annotations using [[Zotfile]]

      Go to Settings > Advanced > Config Editor and then filtering by pdfExtraction.

      The end section on templates was rushed and make take some more time to properly configure Zotfile and the notes exports to get what I want.

    1. "Marx's scholia: Annotations Involving Classical and English Literary Texts in Capital," in Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 29  (2020), 190-219 [CLICK HERE FOR PDF] "Much can be learned from tracking Marx’s use of literary texts in his footnotes, a practice that best can be understood in the context of his classical rhetorical training. His annotations, I argue, both contribute to and—as a kind of counter discourse—reflect the larger dialectical process carried out in his critique of political philosophy. Even though Marx is not writing a literary text as such, he is in fact doing a fair amount of literary criticism, all neatly tucked away in his notes, going so far as to quote long passages from key works in the classical tradition and from the English Renaissance that he then annotates."

      Karl Marx's annotations? I'm in!

      This may be the sort of thing that @remikalir may appreciate as well.

    1. So she writes an explanatory note for Jack, links the note to the Parallel Compiling report, and then links the note to Jack's mailbox: in this open hypertext system, a mailbox is simply a publicly readable document to which the owner has attached a sensor.

      Okay, so this is back to looking like LDN, except the (novel?) idea that after sending the annotation to the annotation service responsible for annotations to the report, her final annotation gets sent to that that annotation service corresponding to a different document—Jack's mailbox. Interesting!

      (Maybe this is explicitly laid out as a possibility in one of the several pieces associated with LDN and I just never noticed?)

    2. a hypermedia server might use sensors to alert users to the arrival of new material: if a sensor were attached to a document, running a new link to the document would set off the sensor

      Linked data notifications?

      (I like the "sensor" imagery.)

    1. They were also instructed not to mark or write on the word list, and not to use their mobile phones or any other electronic devices or aids to assist in the activity.

      Doing this specifically prevents the non-mnemotechniques group from adding their own visual loci in the form of annotations, drolleries, etc.

    1. AS PAPER became ever more abundant from the fourteenth century onward, note-taking proliferated, expanding from erasable wax tablets (the method used by Cicero and medieval wool merchants) and erasable donkey skin to permanent slips of paper and notebooks. An early-modern term for notes was “scraps.” Piles of them were called scrap heaps, and tragically for historians, most notes ended up there. Yet notes made in the margins of great printed books survived, and they are like rare seashells in the sands of the libraries.

      Early versions of annotations. Sad to realize that most of them likely perished.

      Interesting to think of this problem of note taking actually coining the phrase "scrap heap".

    2. Jesuit manuals such as Jeremias Drexel’s Aurifodina, subtitled The Mine of All Arts and Sciences, or the Habit of Excerpting, explained how to best take notes from reading to create commonplace books: personal notebooks of reading extracts that contained the religious, ethical, and political maxims deemed necessary to lead a good life. There were even admonitions about which texts not to read and how not to fold page corners or to mark texts with fingernail scratches.

      Fascinating to see that practices like folding page corners and marking texts are far from new.

    1. One of the flaws of using Digital Mappa for projects like this appears to be that it acts more as a viewer (as a result of it's original use with maps) than as something for text. As a result, when looking at various pages, the URL of the page and it's attendant resources doesn't change, so one can't link to particular resources within the work, nor can one easily use digital tools (Hypothes.is for example), to anchor and annotate portions of the text.

    1. Sidewiki does another interesting thing - it matches comments to the same words elsewhere on the web. For example, my comment on Douglas Adams excellent 1999 piece also shows up in SideWiki on JP Rangiswami's blog where he quotes Douglas Adams too.This hints at a greater possibility for SideWiki - to weave the web together by better by showing commentary across the web from all places that quote and cite each other, correlating by textual quotation and adding annotated links to the commentary from people we trust most.
  12. Apr 2021
    1. Originally, one of these marks (or a plain line) was used in ancient manuscripts to mark passages that were suspected of being corrupted or spurious; the practice of adding such marginal notes became known as obelism. The dagger symbol †, also called an obelisk, is derived from the obelus, and continues to be used for this purpose.
    1. Manifold – Building an Open Source Publishing Platform

      Zach Davis and Matthew Gold

      Re-watching after the conference.

      Manifold

      Use case of showing the process of making the book. The book as a start to finish project rather than just the end product.

      They built the platform while eating their own cooking (or at least doing so with nearby communities).

      Use for this as bookclubs. Embedable audio and video possibilities.

      Use case where people have put journals on the platform and they've grown to add meta data and features to work for that.

      They're allowing people to pull in social media pieces into the platform as well. Perhaps an opportunity to use Webmentions?

      They support epub.

      It can pull in Gutenberg texts.

      Jim Groom talks about the idea of almost using Manifold as an LMS in and of itself. Centering the text as the thing around which we're gathering.

      CUNY Editions of standard e-books with additional resources.Critical editions.

      Using simple tools like Google Docs and then ingest them into Manifold using a YAML file.

      TEI, LaTeX formats and strategies for pulling them in. (Are these actually supported? It wasn't clear.)

      Reclaim Cloud has a container that will run Manifold.

      Zach is a big believer in UX and design as the core of their product.

    1. Introduction

      This is a fun and curious bit of UI here relating to Hypothes.is. There's an icon/button with a link to open the via interface and it auto updates with each additional annotation.

      I'd like to look into how they implemented it and potentially add it as a social sort of feature to my own site.

    1. “Digital technology allows us to be far more adventurous in the ways we read and view and live in our texts,” she said. “Why aren’t we doing more to explore that?”

      Some of the future of the book may be taking new technologies and looking back at books.

      I wonder if the technology that was employed here could be productized and turned into an app or platform to allow this sort of visual display for more (all?) books?

    1. DM gives you simple but/and powerful tools to mark up, annotate and link your own networked collections of digital images and texts. Mark up your image and text documents with highlights that you can then annotate and link together. Identify discreet moments on images and texts with highlight tools including dots, lines, rectangles, circles, polygons, text tags, and multiple color options. Develop your projects and publications with an unlimited number of annotations on individual highlights and entire image and text documents. Highlights and entire documents can host an unlimited number of annotations, and annotations themselves can include additional layers of annotations. Once you've marked up your text and image documents with highlights and annotations, you can create links between individual highlights and entire documents, and your links are bi-directional, so you and other viewers can travel back and forth between highlights. Three kinds of tools, entire digital worlds of possible networks and connections.

      This looks like the sort of project that @judell @dwhly @remikalir and the Hypothes.is team may appreciate, if nothing else but for the user interface set up and interactions.

      I'll have to spin up a copy shortly to take a look under the hood.

  13. Mar 2021
    1. Text printed on the best paper with no margins or unbalanced margins is vile.

      Truer words may have never been said.

      If the margins aren't done properly, where is one to put the marginalia?

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Remi Kalir & Jeremy Dean</span> in Web Annotation as Conversation and Interruption (<time class='dt-published'>03/15/2021 00:21:05</time>)</cite></small>

    1. In the attached YouTube video Dan talks through his post as usual, but he has the added bonus here of showing a split screen of his annotated copy of the book with his Obsidian notebook open. We then see a real time transcription of his note taking process of moving from scant highlights in the book to more fleshed out thoughts and notes in his notebook. We also see him cross referencing various materials for alternate definitions and resources.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HBL-c_nXXQ

    2. Overcompensation is an interesting idea. Again, its effect is non-linear (can't write on the Heathrow runway), but in a line that got 4,500 highlights in Kindle, Taleb said "The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!" (52)

      This highlighted portion sounds deep, but what the hell does it really mean? I feel like I'm missing some context.

      Somewhat more interesting is the notice here that it's such a heavily highlighted passage. I love that Dan pays attention to these bits much as I do.

  14. Feb 2021
    1. 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.

    1. This looks like it's in the vein of annotation tools as well as reference managers to compete with Zotero and Hypothes.is.

      Looks like it's Windows specific. But it is open source now too: https://github.com/jimmejardine/qiqqa-open-source

    1. 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?

    1. I've also gone in and annotated a copy of Maggie Appleton's article with some additional thoughts that Aquiles Carattino and others may appreciate.

  15. Jan 2021
    1. How flip teaching supports undergraduate chemistry laboratory learning

      Design and application of a flipped classroom in gen chem labs, uses handwritten annotations to support student learning but shows evidence of improving engagement and critical thinking

  16. Oct 2020
    1. By wrapping a stateful ExternalModificationDetector component in a Field component, we can listen for changes to a field's value, and by knowing whether or not the field is active, deduce when a field's value changes due to external influences.

      Clever.

      By wrapping a stateful ExternalModificationDetector component in a Field component

      I think you mean wrapping a Field in a ExternalModificationDetector. Or wrapping a ExternalModificationDetector around a Field component.

    1. But thirdly, and most valuably, the template gives you a big space at the bottom to write sentences that summarise the page.  That is, you start writing your critical response on the notes themselves.

      I do much this same thing, however, I'm typically doing it using Hypothes.is to annotate and highlight. These pieces go back to my own website where I can keep, categorize, and even later search them. If I like, I'll often do these sorts of summaries on related posts themselves (usually before I post them publicly if that's something I'm planning on doing for a particular piece.)

    1. If you’d like to differentiate between the various functions a paragraph in a text can have, look out for signal words. For example, the following literal devices may indicate that the function is to build a mental model: schema, allegory, analogy, hypothesis, metaphor, representation, simile, theory. Put a corresponding “model” mark next to these.
    1. Heather Staines1 month agoWould you consider metadata to be a form of annotation? Annotation for machines?Remi Kalir1 month agoYes, absolutely, metadata is a form of annotation. The MIT Press EKS volume “Metadata” is included in our Further Readings section. And the relationship between human-machine annotation, as well as automated annotation, is a topic we pick up in Chapter 7. Do you see additional opportunities for us to more explicitly discuss metadata as a form of annotation?

      It’s a great meta meta example, but the IndieWeb movement uses microformats to mark up portions of web pages with metadata that gives machines the idea of the semantics of a particular post. Thus, I could reply to this web page with a traditional social media “like” as a means of annotating it on my own website. The microformat “u-like-of” would be added to my page’s metadata that allows the web page I’m replying to to read that like intent and potentially display it—though traditionally they’re shown under the text in question.

    1. What am I missing about annotations for the web?

      They're not as wide spread certainly, but several people within the IndieWeb have been experimenting with annotations, and Webmention in conjunction with text fragments called fragmentions. In particular, Kartik Prabhu probably has one of the best examples and his site is able to take webmentions to fragments and show them in the margins in his site (much like Medium does).

    2. There’s also a robust ecosystem of tools to follow users, monitor site annotations etc.

      Wait? What!? I've been wanting to be able to follow users annotations and I'd love the ability to monitor site annotations!! (I've even suggested that they added Webmention before to do direct notifications for site annotations.)

      Where have you seen these things hiding Tom?

    1. However, when groups of readers come together and collectively read and write annotation in response to a shared text, then annotation can - under curated circumstances - spark and sustain conversation.

      I can't help but note that within the IndieWeb community, they're using a combination of online chat and wiki tools which to a great extent are a larger ongoing conversation. The conversation continues on a daily (almost hourly) basis and the substantive portions of that conversation are captured within the wiki for future reference. Interestingly, an internal chat bot, known as Loqi, allows one to actively make changes to the wiki from within the chat. In some sense, within this community there could be an analogy to which came first the chicken or the egg, but replacing those with conversation and annotation.

    1. If anyone is aware of people or groups working on the potential integration of the IndieWeb movement (webmentions) and web annotation/highlighting, please include them in the comments below–I’d really appreciate it.

      The IndieWebCamp.com site lists a small handful of people with Hypothes.is affiliations who had websites, but none of the seem to be active any longer. Perhaps we can track some of them down via twitter?

    1. these abilities – to link, annotate, change, summarize, copy, and share — these are the verbs of gardening.
    2. A stunning thing that we forget, but the link here is not part of the author’s intent, but of the reader’s analysis. The majority of links in the memex are made by readers, not writers. On the world wide web of course, only an author gets to determine links.
    1. When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order.

      If we look at Twitter as a worldwide annotation tool which is generating metadata on a much tinier subset of primary documents (some of which are not truthful themselves), this seems to bear out in that setting as well.

      ref: Kalir & Garcia in Annotation

    1. The author and literary critic Sam Anderson has written: “Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions.”

      I like their idea about Twitter being an annotation tool and to some extent it is, and a good one at that. However, we still need to address the distribution mechanism and the fact that Tweets like this are often bereft of context and cause context collapse.

      Quote tweets and dunking mechanisms would be interesting to study in this context, particularly in a world where people often delete tweets (dunked or not) which means the original context is gone or missing and we're only left with an orphaned annotation.

      Other cultural examples of missing context include commentary for live sporting or cultural events like the Super Bowl, World Series, World Cup Soccer, or the Academy Awards. Watchers will comment on something in real time (often even without an identifying or contextualizing hashtag, eg: #Oscars19), supposing an implied context from their audience, but later generations will be at odds to find or re-complete the original context.

    1. mmentary. It also includes many annotated newspaper and magazine articles.An articMaha Bali2 weeks agowould be nice to include a screenshot. Also, I feel like I need to read up on Cambodian history to understand the significance of this particular royal - you don’t explicitly talk about how he is using power here. Was he trying to influence public opinion, was he just annotating for his own knowledge and learning, what kind of power is at play here?(I also wonder if the whole leaders having “right to express freely their view” does not work to anyone’s favor in the case of Donald Trump, so I would contest this strongly. That freedom of expression for political leaders maybe should be weighted differently than for the general population, no? As it has broader consequences for the entire country or even the world…

      I nearly added it above in the opening, but Maha’s comment reminds me of it again. In a countercultural way, a web developer created a browser plugin that will re-format all of Donald Trump’s tweets to appear as if they were written in crayon by an eight year old: http://maketrumptweetseightagain.com/

      While not technically annotation in a “traditional” form discussed in the text so far—though close from the perspective of the redaction technique mentioned above—, by reformatting the font of Trumps tweets, it completely changes their context, meaning, and political weight.

    2. And would a hip hop fan question, much less downvote, a “verified” Genius annotation authored by Kendrick Lamar that explains the meaning behind his music?

      But if we're going to consider music as art, isn't a lot of the value and power of art in the "eye of the beholder"? To some extent art's value is in the fact that it can have multiple interpretations. From this perspective, once it's been released, Lamar's music isn't "his" anymore, it becomes part of a broader public that will hear and interpret it as they want to. So while Lamar may go back and annotate what he may have meant at the time as an "expert", doesn't some of his art thereby lose some power in that he is tacitly stating that he apparently didn't communicate his original intent well?

      By comparison and for contrast one could take the recent story of Donald Trump's speech (very obviously written by someone else) about the recent mass shootings and compare them with the polar opposite message he spews on an almost daily basis from his Twitter account. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/teleprompter-trump-meets-twitter-trump-as-the-president-responds-to-mass-slayings/2019/08/05/cdd8ea78-b799-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html

    3. “Every Cambodian... including the King has the right to express freely their view.”

      While I like the sentiment here, a lot of the power of the message comes from not only the medium, but the distribution which it receives. Many daily examples of "typical" annotation done by common people are done in a way that incredibly few will ultimately see the message. The fact that the annotations of the emperor were republished and distributed was what, in great part, gave them so much weight and value. Similarly here with the example of the King's blog or Alexandra Bell's work which was displayed in public. I hope there is more discussion about the idea of distribution in what follows.

    4. Art by O’Hare and Bell highlight - both visually and conceptually - the dialogic quality of annotation expressing power.

      While I'm reading this, I can't help but wishing that Hypothes.is would add a redaction functionality to their product. They could potentially effect it by using the highlighter functionality, but changing the CSS to have the color shown be the same as that of the (body) text instead of being yellow.

  17. mitpressonpubpub.mitpress.mit.edu mitpressonpubpub.mitpress.mit.edu
    1. I’ve actively participated in a revisionist sort of annotation that is part redaction/part revision in that I have gone through digital copies of some children’s books and in cases where it didn’t matter if the main character was male, I would actively use book editing software to make all the lead characters female for the sake of reading to girls. Often I’ve done this while reading out loud, but around the 1st/2nd grade level when children begin to read for themselves, physical annotations/revisions are required.
    1. To have, but maybe not to read. Like Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” seems to have been an “event” book that many buyers didn’t stick with; an analysis of Kindle highlights suggested that the typical reader got through only around 26 of its 700 pages. Still, Piketty was undaunted.

      Interesting use of digital highlights--determining how "read" a particular book is.

    1. Some researchers have referred to this type of learning arrangement as anchored discussion.23 When students “talk” with one another about a shared text through digital annotation, evidence suggests.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }3Lauren Zucker, Jeffrey Pomerantz, Maha Bali annotation affords richer conversation as students pay closer attention to the text, establish more proximal connections between their discussion and the source material, and embrace opportunities to elaborate their ideas, clarify, and learn from the viewpoints of their peers.
    2. Given technological advances and a trend to promote digital annotation by students in school, empirical findings are mixed regarding the evidence-based benefits of handwritten annotation for learning.

      There are also now digital tools like Anki, Mnemosyne, and even Amazon's notebook tools that allow highlights and annotations in books to be transferred into digital flashcards to be used for spaced reviews of knowledge and information. I suspect that even students that heavily highlight their textbooks are rarely reviewing over those highlights after-the-fact, and have generally found this to be the case when asking those I see actively doing so.

    3. In April of 2019, at a digital learning conference, Manuel Espinoza spoke with educators, technologists, and annotation enthusiasts about R2L.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }1Nate Angell and “the role that Hypothesis plays in human rights work.”

      Manuel Espinoza, “Keynote,” AnnotatED Summit, April 2, 2018, https://youtu.be/5LNmSjDHipM.

    4. Annotation Studio
    5. The Task Annotation Project in Science (TAPS) provides K-12 educators with annotated assessment tasks, aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards, that help guide teachers in more equitably monitoring their students’ learning.37 Osmosis is a repository of open educational resources (OER) created to crowdsource the future of medical education.38 Undergraduate and graduate medical students have access to thousands of digital resources, and they have also used annotation - through comments, feedback forms, and ratings - to improve the quality of these learning materials.39 The National Science Digital Library (NSDL), created in 2000, is an archive of open access teaching and learning resources for learners of all ages across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines.40 Annotation has been used to tag the NSDL’s resources and improve information accessibility, support student interaction with multimedia content through a digital notebook, and educators have annotated NSDL resources to design online learning activities for their students.41 And research about the digital annotation tool Perusall.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }3Troy Hicks, Nate Angell, Jeremy Dean, often used in conjunction with science textbooks, has shown that college students’ pre-reading and annotation practices can subsequently improve exam performance.
    6. Paul Allison, who administers the online annotation platform Now Comment.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }1Chris Aldrich that is popular among some K-12 educators and their students.
    1. I find it somewhat interesting to note that with 246 public annotations on this page using Hypothes.is, that from what I can tell as of 4/2/2019 only one of them is a simple highlight. All the rest are highlights with an annotation or response of some sort.

      It makes me curious to know what the percentage distribution these two types have on the platform. Is it the case that in classroom settings, which many of these annotations appear to have been made, that much of the use of the platform dictates more annotations (versus simple highlights) due to the performative nature of the process?

      Is it possible that there are a significant number of highlights which are simply hidden because the platform automatically defaults these to private? Is the friction of making highlights so high that people don't bother?

      I know that Amazon will indicate heavily highlighted passages in e-books as a feature to draw attention to the interest relating to those passages. Perhaps it would be useful/nice if Hypothes.is would do something similar, but make the author of the highlights anonymous? (From a privacy perspective, this may not work well on articles with a small number of annotators as the presumption could be that the "private" highlights would most likely be directly attributed to those who also made public annotations.

      Perhaps the better solution is to default highlights to public and provide friction-free UI to make them private?

      A heavily highlighted section by a broad community can be a valuable thing, but surfacing it can be a difficult thing to do.

    1. appreciate your help

      I think that a major part of improving the issue of abuse and providing consent is building in notifications so that website owners will at least be aware that their site is being marked up, highlighted, annotated, and commented on in other locations or by other platforms. Then the site owner at least has the knowledge of what's happening and can then be potentially provided with information and tools to allow/disallow such interactions, particularly if they can block individual bad actors, but still support positive additions, thought, and communication. Ideally this blocking wouldn't occur site wide, which many may be tempted to do now as a knee-jerk reaction to recent events, but would be fine grained enough to filter out the worst offenders.

      Toward the end of notifications to site owners, it would be great if any annotating activity would trigger trackbacks, pingbacks, or the relatively newer and better webmention protocol of the WW3C out of the http://IndieWebCamp.com movement. Then site owners would at least have notifications about what is happening on their site that might otherwise be invisible to them.

      Perhaps there's a way to further implement filters or tools (a la Akismet on platforms like WordPress) that allow site users to mark materials as spam, abusive, or other so that they are then potentially moved from "public" facing to "private" so that the original highlighter can still see their notes, but that the platform isn't allowing the person's own website to act as a platform to give reach to bad actors.

      Further some site owners might appreciate graded filters (G, PG, PG-13, R, X) so that users or even parents can filter what they're willing to see. Consider also annotations on narrative forms that might be posted as spoilers--how can these be guarded against? (Possibly with CSS and a spoiler tag?) Options can be built into the platform itself as well as allowing server-side options for truly hard cases.

      My coding skills are rustier than I wish they were, but I'm available to help/consult if needed.

    1. merely stops you from writing in the margins here on this website.

      Does the script Audrey Watters is using really stop people from annotating her site directly?

      Based on my quick test, one can still (carefully) use Hypothes.is to highlight and annotate her site, but the script at least prevents Hypothes.is from showing that annotation. When visiting her site with Hypothes.is' Chrome browser extension on, it does show that there is one annotation on the page. It then requires some hunting to find this comment.

    1. The New York Times

      I'm wondering if the NY Times used the summit to figure out how to prevent annotating at all? Somehow I'm not able to reasonably use either Hypothes.is or Genius with it in multiple browsers.

      In particular I just can't highlight anything on the page, and attempts usually end up moving me to a new article. Blech!

    1. They both obviously point to the same specific page, and their beginnings are identical. The second one has a # followed by the words “I’m not looking” with some code for blank spaces and an apostrophe. Clicking on the fragmention URL will take you to the root page which then triggers a snippet of JavaScript on my site that causes the closest container with the text following the hash to be highlighted in a bright yellow color. The browser also automatically scrolls down to the location of the highlight.
    2. Create an IFTTT.com recipe to port your Hypothesis RSS feed into WordPress posts. Generally chose an “If RSS, then WordPress” setup and use the following data to build the recipe: Input feed: https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=username (change username to your user name) Optional title: {{EntryTitle}} Body: {{EntryContent}} from {{EntryUrl}} <br />{{EntryPublished}} Categories: Highlight (use whatever categories you prefer, but be aware they’ll apply to all your future posts from this feed) Tags: hypothes.is Post status (optional): I set mine to “Draft” so I have the option to keep it privately or to publish it publicly at a later date.

      Posting this solely to compare my Hypothes.is highlights and annotations on my website with Will's version.

      I'm still tinkering with mine and should have a Micropub based version using IFTTT and Webhooks done soon.

    1. Interestingly, I’ve found that Kindle is useful in this respect. I buy Kindle versions of books that I need for work, and highlight passages and bookmark pages as I go. And when I’ve finished the software obligingly has a collection of all the passages I’ve highlighted.

      John, you should spend a minute or two to learn about Hypothes.is (https://web.hypothes.is/) as an online tool for doing this. It's a free account or you can self-host the software yourself if you like. There are also functionalities to have public, private, or group annotations. I often pull my own annotations to my personal website similar to your own Memex and publish them there (example: https://boffosocko.com/kind/annotation/)

      Syndicated copy: https://boffosocko.com/2020/05/21/55771248/)