This was eventually published at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14682753.2017.1362168 which also has additional links/references.

"Information" is another word that might fit into this group of over-saddled words.

This explanation also highlights an additional idea of open itself. I have heard many in the W3C space criticize the open standard of web annotation arrived at because of the ultimate monoculture of the space. Most of the participants of the process were all related to Hypothes.is in some way and the result was a single product that implemented the standard. To my knowledge no other companies, groups, or individual programmers have separately implemented the standard.

In this sense, while the "standard" is openly defined, it isn't as open as other standards which were mote slowly evolved and implemented gradually and more broadly by various programming languages and disparate groups.

One of the pieces missing from Hypothes.is is the curateable notebook which more easily allows one to create new content from one's annotations.

Search is certain there, but being able to move the pieces about and re-synthesize them into new emergent pieces is the second necessary step.

Not to mention the fact that the experiment will continue on into the future past the official publication.

I personally identify with this since I'm porting my annotations and thoughts to a notebook as part of a process for active thinking, revision, writing, and eventual publication.

There's something discordant here in a scholarly article about having academic participants with names like SenorG and actualham. It's almost like a 70's farce starring truckers with bizarre CB handles. It's even more bizarre since I know some of the researchers behind these screennames.

Is the pseudonymous nature of some of these handles useful in hiding the identity of the participants and thereby forcing one to grapple only with their ideas and not the personas, histories and contexts behind them?

Something about this is reminiscent of WordPress' mission to democratize publishing. We can also compare it to Facebook whose (stated) mission is to connect people, while it's actual mission is to make money by seemingly radicalizing people to the extremes of our political spectrum.

This highlights the fact that while many may look at content moderation on platforms like Facebook as removing their voices or deplatforming them in the case of people like Donald J. Trump or Alex Jones as an anti-democratic move. In fact it is not. Because of Facebooks active move to accelerate extreme ideas by pushing them algorithmically, they are actively be un-democratic. Democratic behavior on Facebook would look like one voice, one account and reach only commensurate with that person's standing in real life. Instead, the algorithmic timeline gives far outsized influence and reach to some of the most extreme voices on the platform. This is patently un-democratic.

To what extent does the fact that Hypothesis annotations show up in our feeds (and are thus useful for us tracking our movement through texts) while mere highlights do not, determine usage patterns ?

In another sense, though, it makes the reader's process more visible so that the reader no longer needs to trespass into the author's territory. I've always been dissatisfied with the lit-crit position that the author must be completely decentered and her contribution minimized to make room for the reader. THIS seems to create a real space for the reader, and in so doing maybe it also allows the author to reclaim some of her space.

Interesting -- what would it look like to have a shared annotation layer that could be accessed by a variety of tools?

General point - I've been asked to join in this dialogue but it is already very rich and substantial so opting to add only a couple of comments rather than reinvent the wheel.

Does this undersell your contribution? By which I mean, this looks like it's restating an opposition - between authority and 'the people' that takes us back to Gilmoor and others, Clay Shirky even, but what's happening here is disrupting such binaries? Or - and this may be another tangent you don't need - it's like Ranciere's stuff on the pedagogic relation - something like 'flipped' only inverts the relation, it doesn't disrupt it necessarily?

Does this, then, also do something to disrupt the discourse of 'impact' as currently articulated / imposed by REF etc?

This term is new to me. It really catches my attention while at the same time making me wonder whether there is such a thing as a published text that is not performative. Is the act of publishing - even if as an annotation in the margins of a niche academic journal where it is unlikely to ever be discovered by another set of eyes - inherently performative, regardless of author intent and potentiality for audience?

YES!!! This should be the goal in its entirety. I'm so glad to hear you say "promote a more civil discussion". Too often civil discussions are avoided and, many times in education, not even offered. How are we to sustain a successful democracy without civil discussions being present and offered regularly? How are we to train up successful, contributing citizens without offering civil discussion opportunities with regularity? It can't happen and won't happen, my hope is Hypothes.is can help achieve this!

You're right, however, a culture of civility and inquiry can very easily overpower trolls if it's built correctly. A strong community can withstand many attacks if it's genuineness and civility remain strong!

I share this worry with you! I believe this infringes on the realm of censorship. How can one post something on the web and opt out of web annotation? Seems to be a double standard...I want the public to hear this but I don't want to hear their thoughts. Certainly limits the ability to speak truth to power.

Completely agree here! It is in listening to each other that we progress. Without listening to their readers, authors are simply writing what it is they want, think, need, and feel. Without listening to authors, the readers are necessarily even reading for understanding. It seems cyclical but important to note, I wonder what would happen if we listened to each other more often, especially in the case of web text truly bringing about the "net-working" RK described.

An important establishment in learning from text. How often we presume the author to be the authority. It's important to be open and willing to listen to the ideas of others if we are really seeking expertise. Growing from feedback and criticism is one of my greatest achievements.

It is my hope to see this in all learning environments, too often it is pre-established or determined without respect to learners' needs and interests.

RK is not the only one, I'm still feeling very new as well and learning each time I annotate. The newness is sometimes intimidating but I proceed nonetheless. How might it become more user friendly and inviting to grow the audience and participants?

Great point here, when can I use Hypothes.is on my mobile device? I'm falling behind due to the need of being at a keyboarded laptop. How might be promote equitable access to such great tools?

It may be a challenge, but it shouldn't be very hard. The hypothe.is R package is a good start in creating a data science workflow. This workflow would have a clear advantage in higher education... especially in academic disciplines that use R.

This strikes me as a key factor in web annotation reaching the mainstream, especially in education. When an educator asks, "How is this significantly different from leaving comments at the end of an article?" it will be helpful to have a concise, comprehensible and convincing response. When I speak about this, I focus on the "contexting" that web annotation facilitates and the potentiality for authentic audience and dialogue. The problem with both of these points is that a critic can (rightly) respond that existing page-bottom commentary can already allow a degree of both of these.

Just as there is ambiguity around defining a word as simple as open this conversation hints at an emerging struggle with a shared meaning of annotation. As Remi points out, the traditional view of annotation is as a tool acting in service of reading comprehension. What we are talking about goes beyond that.

While Merriam Webster and other disseminators of meaning can add extra definitions to their dictionaries under the word 'annotation', I wonder if an easier path to meaning making might be through using different words. There's a risk that it only leads to complications and muddying the waters over semantics but is it worth considering? I describe it as uptexting (not sure if I thought of that on my own or borrowed from someone else). I've heard University of Texas' Carl Blyth describe this as Social Reading and am drawn to this term because it captures the community aspect and might be less confusing because it doesn't seek to reappropriate an existing, commonly held definition.

Allow me to push back a bit here. While the "canned responses" could, in some environments, build fences around student creativity and expression, it does not have to. From my limited play in the Ponder sandbox, I noticed that students could click on the canned responses OR offer their own annotation just like with Hypothes.is (though I am not sure if the annotation is limited to text). Also, I perceive the canned responses as allowing for scaffolding for younger readers and second language learners.

Yes, this is part of the paradoxical way that open works, as Martin Weller has argued. This is the crux of all of the challenge for me right now.

suggest edit: change to "hopeful."

YES, I agree with this.

Honestly, I am flummoxed about how to respond to the fake news/propaganda thing. Notions of "truth" and "credibility" and "verifiability" are so complicated, and I don't want to be forced by the terms of a fucked up debate to rally around reductive ideas that some things are true and some are false. And then again, I don't want to advocate for an anything-goes approach that makes room for climate- and holocaust-deniers. I am an active user of Snopes. But how do we allow for the richness and complexity of diverse perspectives and non-dominant narratives, while resisting the emerging leftist role of "truth police?" I think H might allow us to do the kind of discursive work-- dialogic work-- that helps here. I don't like to think about that work as fact-checking as much as the critical exposure of epistemologies. We are all biased. Anyone else uncomfortable with the idea that if we just science enough (or whatever) we can get to some kind of pure, irrefutable truth? How could that end up hurting the causes we are trying to advance?

Yes. This.

Interesting phrase. Thinking about how all spaces are social (I think?) and all are built (I think?), and so what exactly makes the sociality or structure of a space "open"? Could it have to do not just with inclusivity, but also with the decentering effect that resists boundaries and borders-- and maybe therefore meaning? Invoking Homi Bhabha here in thinking about how margins define centers (not vice versa) and wondering if part of what feels politically important about web annotation is the way that it decenters the text itself, makes it incomplete, multi-authored, dynamic. And that will both challenge master-narratives and maybe also challenge meaning itself, which can be alienating to participants and a challenge to community building. Sorry-- I used to teach Intro Lit Crit. :)

I know I am basically just another lit crit perspective here, but honestly that background-- particularly as a poststructuralist and probably as a postmodernist--inflects so much of my thinking about what the web is and can be. I think moving from English to Interdisciplinary Studies has also made me value the perspective that sees all knowledge as always incomplete; I love that my new field has a core value of noting that there is always another perspective, even if it's not visible or known yet. So when I work with students on the web-- especially in "intro" courses that are supposed to indoctrinate them to the core principles and theories of Interdisciplinary Studies-- I like to present the web as a space that allows and supports dynamism rather than stasis (process over product). But this is so out of line with so much about how teachers think about "public" writing and projects; we want them to be "portfolio" worthy, tidy, complete. When student work is flawed, I think it's a reminder to us about how we can think of all scholarly work. I love that H lets us focus on critique without a requirement that we devalue the work-- in fact, quite the opposite (we critique what has value and potential and impact and utility...). Just thinking out loud, but I think this aspect of "open-endedness" is really the core (ha ha-- irony) of so many of my areas of interest right now.

Thinking about this term, and about preceding it with "everyday." Wondering how one becomes this, whether it can ever be mundane without erasing the privilege inherent in the status.

So much of this resonates after reading Martin Weller's wonderful little post today (and the awesome PPT embedded therein): http://blog.edtechie.net/openness/the-paradoxes-of-open-scholarship/

For example, we might simply ask that each participant refrain from using hashtags as a final thought because that is a form of sarcasm or punchline that can be misconstrued or shut down honest debate or agreeable disagreement.

We could ask respondents to reply to any comment that they read twice because of tone to use "ouch" as a tag or a textual response. The offending respondent could respond with "oops" in order to preserve good will in an exchange of ideas.

Finally, the first part of a flash mob might occur here, in the page notes, where norms could be quickly negotiated and agreed upon with a form of protocol.

What do annotations in an edited volume of Shakespeare communicate to a struggling 9th grade reader? It strikes me that reader-text interactions always leave meaning negotiable, messy and interaction dependent.

Does this question attempt to rubric-ize the notes we'd put in margins?

In that way, using a digital, sharable sticky note matters. Anyone can make a mess with sticky notes and a more skilled respondent can support another's meaning making with sticky notes.

This question seems like it should be more specific to disciplines. What is annotation in the legal world? How about for scientists? For beginning readers?

If I'm annotating a text to make meaning, that's different than if I'm a prof annotating a historical text to provide relevant background. The two notes have only their "noteness" in common, I'd say.

Neatness matters for teachers who have to keep track of the artifacts students create as writers. If my students are doing great work but I can't see it, I'm disorganized as a teacher. In the online instructional space it is even more important that teachers can see a footprint. If a tool leaves it to chance whether a student's work will be found by the teacher or a stranger, it is a messy tool, from a teacher's perspective.

I'd be interested to know how you test this theory, or hypothesis. What does user feedback look like? How is it analyzed?

Great question because it shows how our language evolves as we learn in much the same way we do.

Teachers ask for textbooks all the time and insist that student's online work stay inside a walled garden LMS. Profs, too. Empathic listening reveals that they are not novices but professionals with legitimate concerns.

Agreed that tone matters. Open standards are real things but the word open has been evolving since it was first uttered and it predates Linux and the Apache server.

This is a conversation I heard as I worked with Karen Fasimpaur on various projects beginning with P2PU. She used to hold to a rigid conception of the word open that prevails in web design communities, before accepting more nuanced definitions of the word as she worked more with learners in open spaces.

The analytics of this article as inquiry are to some degree plain to interested readers. If a reader wants to test out the hypothesis that the conversation will be "interrupted," all they have to do is check the margins. I'm curious about the choice of the word interrupted, tho. Won't bookworms in these margins build on the conversation, the way kids in a sandbox build with what they find? Do annotations interrupt or do they make plain the reader-text interactions?

This reminds me of Paul Allison's LRNG playlist in which youth have to choose keywords associated with their own inquiry questions.

There is, truly, so much potential in these tools and approaches toward asynchronous, distributed reading and writing. One question I have, already, is how such distributed forms of production-consumption further dissolve notions of textuality and authorship so entrenched within traditional notions and practices of scholarship and empirical research. The flattened hierarchies, especially, threaten the institutionalized power structures which have tightly controlled the design, review, and dissemination of scholarship and research.

Wow what a question. I can't wait to see what other people have to say. It seems like it would be easy to come up with ways that are not civil, or trustworthy, online discourse - but to frame this as which conditions are created is far more powerful.

As I mentioned in an earlier annotation, I think much of this has to do with shifting personal epistemology through the process of discourse with "authorities" and authors, the societal weighting of evidence and supportive information, and the interaction among participants and text at various levels. But there is a whole lot there that can go wrong. I love all of the occasions I've had to interact with others via hypothes.is thus far, but it does strike me that they have been primarily among peers with similar perspectives, epistemology, ideals, and academic background as myself. And perhaps that is a good place to start- modeling constructive and supportive behaviors in certain communities of practice?

Edit to add: I think the social expectation that comes with using hypothes.is the way I have (through annotation flash mobs and annotatathons) is important. Having annotated this article as separate from a flash mob type event I find myself constantly checking back for new annotations, commentary, and responses. Web annotation for me has become inherently a cooperative and collaborative practice.

something we should always ask ourselves, and ask ourselves repeatedly

in the same line of thought as with choral explanations?

I think there are particular personal epistemological assumptions tied up in this, that impact not only how we wish web annotation to be used, but how it functionally can and will primarily be used. If you approach knowledge as something coming from an authority, it is very hard to fathom being able to create it yourself, or talk back to it, even if those platforms exist. Conversely, if you think any opinion is valid, because knowledge is completely subjected as individual "truths" then I think you end up with what we see in a majority of places on the internet that allow discourse... I wonder if, and suspect that, hypothes.is could a powerful tool in shifting personal epistemology - especially where the text creators or "authorities" engage with annotators and the comments they pose...

...forgive me, I bring everything back to personal epistemologies

As always, so glad you did.

What sort of digital literacy does this require?

oh right, authoritative scholarly voice... guess I should leave out all those "I think"s... ;)

now I am just adding noise; this can be deleted.

Are there standards for citing web annotations? How do we acknowledge and credit this shared authorship?

+1

I think this is such a powerful motivation for using web annotation as a component of peer-review and academic conversations.

I love the idea of the public playground, and I think that concept along with the affordances of hypothes.is, say something about the relative safety net of open annotation. Like a public playground, it is not without risk to those participating; however, a degree of anonymity is still offered. You can disconnect your hypothes.is user information from your identity. This can, of course, be both a good and bad thing in generating commentary, but is an important feature of this particular "openness"

I also just love the connection to "play"

Could we perhaps use tags or groups to functionally sort through the layers of "noise" ? Perhaps things like: content critique, meta, grammatical nuances, etc?

There’s also a growing culture of people on Twitter hacking the microblogging platform as an annotation tool. They call them Screenshorts, Tweets that use screenshots of highlighted text to ground commentary. To me it’s just web annotation 1.0. But they’re just trying to be good English students, right?

From a pedagogical and rhetorical perspective, at least, an annotated Trump speech is more effective than a random comment out there in the ether of the net. Similarly, a close read of the Clinton emails I believe would reveal there’s not much of a story there. But as a culture, we are not engaging with politics in that way, and we would be better off if we did.

Interrupted seems like such a harsh word here. Perhaps punctuated fits better? You don't have to interrupt reading the conversation with the annotations, but you can. Of course in a journal of disruptive media, maybe interruption is exactly the disruption desired...

Burn!