I wonder whether Marc would still write this the same way today, in a world where web annotation is finally a W3C standard and Hypothesis looks much more like the future of web annotation than Genius...

Hence the need for #OpenAnnotation to pair up with some of the other opens. Hypothes.is people are doing their part, but still.

How can I comment on that specific area? According to http://iiif.io/api/presentation/2.0:

Although normally annotations are used for associating commentary with the thing the annotation’s text is about, the Open Annotation model allows any resource to be associated with any other resource, or parts thereof, and it is reused for both commentary and painting resources on the canvas.

How will open annotation interoperate with IIIF? Some clues here:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-openannotation/2014Sep/0007.html

http://iiif.io/api/presentation/2.0/#image-resources

http://iiif.io/api/presentation/2.0/#comment-annotations

Will 2017 be “the year of annotations”?

Had missed this announcement. The annotation scene has this interesting ambivalence between being old and new, forward-looking and somewhat nostalgic. Wish Diigo were forward-looking enough to get into Open Annotations.

As the W3C is having its international conference in a few days (and since we’re holding Open Knowledge Fest concurrently), the Open Annotation web standard could be an interesting topic for thoughtful dialogue. The first step is acknowledging that people’s needs differ largely, in terms of annotations. Doug Schepers has an insightful way to put it.

Glad this was mentioned. To the Eric Raymonds of this world, such a response sounds “perfectly legitimate”. But it’s precisely what can differentiate communities and make one more welcoming than the other. Case in point: Arduino-related forums, in contrast with the Raspberry Pi community. Was looking for information about building a device to track knee movement. Noticed that “goniometer” was the technical term for that kind of device, measuring an angle (say, in physiotherapy). Ended up on this page, where someone had asked a legitimate question about Arduino and goniometers. First, the question:

Trying to make a goniometer using imu (gy-85). Hoe do I aquire data from the imu using the arduino? How do I code the data acquisition? Are there any tutorials avaible online? Thanks =)

Maybe it wouldn’t pass the Raymond test for “smart questions”, but it’s easy to understand and a straight answer could help others (e.g., me).

Now, the answer:

For me, google found 87,000,000 hits for gy-85. I wonder why it failed for you.

Wow. Just, wow.

Then, on the key part of the question (the goniometer):

No idea what that is or why I should have to google it for you.

While this one aborted Q&A is enough to put somebody off Arduino forever, it’s just an example among many. Like Stack Overflow, Quora, and geek hideouts, Arduino-related forums are filled with these kinds of snarky comments about #LMGTFY.

Contrast this with the Raspberry Pi. Liz Upton said it best in a recent interview (ca. 25:30):

People find it difficult to remember that sometimes when somebody comes along… and appears to be “not thinking very hard”, it could well be because they’re ten years old.

And we understand (from the context and such) that it’s about appearance (not about “not thinking clearly”). It’s also not really about age.

So, imagine this scenario. You’re teacher a class, seminar, workshop… Someone asks a question about using data from a device to make it into a goniometer. What’s the most appropriate strategy? Sure, you might ask the person to look for some of that information online. But there are ways to do so which are much more effective than the offputting ’tude behind #LMGTFY. Assuming they do search for that kind of information, you might want to help them dig through the massive results to find something usable, which is a remarkably difficult task which is misunderstood by someone who answer questions about goniometers without knowing the least thing about them.

The situation also applies to the notion that a question which has already been asked isn’t a legitimate question. A teacher adopting this notion would probably have a very difficult time teaching anyone who’s not in extremely narrow a field. (Those teachers do exist, but they complain bitterly about their job.)

Further, the same logic applies to the pedantry of correcting others. Despite the fact that English-speakers’ language ideology allows for a lot of non-normative speech, the kind of online #WordRage which leads to the creation of “language police” bots is more than a mere annoyance. Notice the name of this Twitter account (and the profile of the account which “liked” this tweet).

Lots of insight from @BiellaColeman on people who do things “for the lulz”. Her work is becoming increasingly relevant to thoughtful dialogue on annotations.

Despite an important continuity.

Could soooo imagine a presentation on using #Hypothesis with #PressBooks!

Neat definition of “open”, very contextual, it sounds like.

Wish [h] had a similar feature. And that NB supported #OpenAnnotation.

Could see a lot of potential for Open Standards, including annotations. What’s not so clear is how they can manage to produce such ePub while maintaining their DRM-focused practice. Heard about LCP (Lightweight Content Protection). But have yet to get a fully-accessible ePub which is also DRMed in such a way.

Open Annotations could serve private purposes, like FoxMarks.

The “Open World Assumption” is central to this post and to the actual shift in paradigm when it comes to moving from documents to data. People/institutions have an alleged interest in protecting the way their assets are described. Even libraries. The Open World Assumption makes it sound quite chaotic, to some ears. And claims that machine learning will solve everything tend not to help the unconvinced too much. Something to note is that this ability to say something about a third party’s resource connects really well with Web annotations (which do more than “add metadata” to those resources) and with the fact that no-cost access to some item of content isn’t the end of the openness.

Will our annotations issues be solved, in nine years?

Interesting that SVG guru Shepazu would talk about Hypothes.is…

Wonder how Colwiz compares to Annotator.js …

Waiting for those to be promoted, through Hypothesis and other Open Annotations platforms.

Sounds like separating content from format (à la \(LaTeX\)) and there are interesting parallels between annotations, metadata, and formatting. All of these can be described as “layers”, in the common metaphor.

Slick, neat, and informative.

Powerful but misunderstood (or, even, difficult to grasp) feature of Open Annotations.

No ePub?

Interesting initiatives for video annotations, especially in educational contexts.

Great argument for OERs, no? And Open Annotations, for that matter.

Anchors are a key issue. Hope that deliverable will suffice.

how the Internet would have turned out differently if users had been able to annotate everything

Maybe a new phase in the Internet’s development will allow us to observe this.

I love this early UX imagining of the linking/annotation process by Vannevar. What's notable here of course is that he suggested that creating links between things was a function that something visitors (trailblazers) could do. In a sense, to him the notion of a hypertext link, and a clickable annotation w/ two targets were mutually interchangeable ideas. Today, these are distinct. The idea that a visitor can do this, is only possible within the emerging idea of Open Annotation as we understand it now. It's why those of us exploring it are so excited about its potential.