This is a good example and shows some great power, but where is the open annotation occuring? It seems obvious that they must have a closed group, but how does that information leak out of their mini-silo? When I visit the original page of the example it currently only shows one annotation. As a broader member of the general public, how do I have better access to expert groups and the annotations they're making on the things I'm actively reading?

Perhaps deeper than you want to go, but I'm curious about your thoughts on Medium's UI that allows in line commentary/comments/reactions (which are also given their own separate URL's which don't include all of their context) versus other platforms that would simply include those as comments at the bottom.

Though it could do more so if the text had additional blank marginal spaces for the reader to add their own commentary (or comments).

Before I even begin this section, I want to note my general thought that annotations prior to the spread of the internet (and even up until just the last few years, let's say to the birth of Hypothes.is) were generally seen by very few people--like those that wrote them and at best perhaps two or three others unless they were later moved into longer papers, speeches, or other material in another aggregated form. Owen Gingerich's study of this in The Book that Nobody Read is like an extreme case of the spread of annotations from professors to students and I suspect would be an outlier.

However even in the current climate with a more social media based networked set of annotations, they're still not widely used or distributed, though are becoming somewhat more so as the ease of use of the tools and the adoption by smaller groups takes hold. But even given this small growth, by analogy I might say that adoption of digital annotations are at the level of late first century Christianity--it's still small and is far from the spread and acceptance of, say, 17th century Christianity.

This is the label you were hoping someone would put on this right?

Image courtesy of icanhascheeseburger.

These are known as a chyron.

I can't help but glossthe word gloss, [a brief explanation (as in the margin or between the lines of a text) of a difficult or obscure word or expression].

It also seems a bit like the following paragraph actually glosses over a more concrete definition of the word?

Now I'm wondering how to effectuate an asterisk more simply on digital platforms.

• simply doesn't quite do it in an overlay system like hypothes.is though their highlight set up does quite well.

Perhaps bookbook.pubpub's annotation indicator could act as an asterisk whether the note field is empty or not?

Here I can't help but wonder about people who wrote their notes or annotations into their own personal commonplace books rather than directly in the texts themselves. Perhaps somewhat tangential to the broader ideas here, but do the annotations necessarily need to be in the text themselves? What sorts of separate lives do unlinked annotations go on to have? What do annotations over the ages have from living within the text itself, separately in notebooks, notecards, commonplace books, or even in the modern age with digital annotating tools that can be seen, read, and distributed to much larger audiences?

I’d agree. Annotations are a tool and can be used for both positive and negative outcomes.

Related somewhat to my bible example above, one could view the individual texts of the New Testament as annotations to the Hebrew bible, in which case they changed a movement from being a religion of Jesus to a religion about Jesus—one which not coincidentally makes him one of the best known people to have ever lived (see: http://pantheon.media.mit.edu/rankings/people/all/all/-4000/2010/H15).

In the case of my earlier genealogical example, the books of the New Testament go back and parallel the lineages of the Old Testament to draw a direct line from King David to Jesus spanning roughly a 1000 years. This is seemingly suspect for a man who would have most likely been an illiterate and poor carpenter, but certainly served the purposes of Greek, Jewish, and Aramaic writers of the time, particularly against the ruling patriarchy of Judea and Rome at the time.

A well known popular culture version of this appears in the title of the book and film Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince as well as a primary plot point in which Potter actively eschews a beaten up copy of a potions textbook, but to his pleasant surprise find a heavily annotated text that helps him significantly in his studies.

https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Severus_Snape%27s_copy_of_Advanced_Potion-Making

Google has accelerated this by using search to better link pieces of knowledge in the modern world, but scholars have been linking thoughts manually for centuries.

Other great examples include teaching and scientific progress. Owen Gingerich details annotations in all the extant copies of Copernicus in his text The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. There it seemed obvious that the moving state-of-the art of science and teaching was reflected in the annotations made by professors who handed those annotations down to students who also copied them into their textbooks.

In some sense this is a textual equivalent of the directors commentary tracks on DVDs from the 1990's in which one could watch films with overdubbed running commentary of the film's director (and often cast, producers, et al. as appropriate).

The first time I recall seeing such journalistic annotations was on the web in The Smoking Gun (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/) which generally annotated court documents that were the source of newsworthy tidbits—generally relating to celebrities or gossip pages.

But why not mix them together the way the IndieWeb has done?! A few people are using the new W3C recommendation spec for Webmention along with fragmentions to send a version of comments/marginalia/annotations to sites that accept them and have the ability to display them!

A good example of this is Kartik Prabhu's website which does this somewhat like Medium does. One can write their response to a sub-section of his post on their own website, and using Webmention (yes, there's a WordPress plugin for that: https://wordpress.org/plugins/webmention/ ) send him the response. It then shows up on his site as a quote bubble next to the appropriate section which can then be opened and viewed by future readers. Example: https://kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia For those interested, he's opensourced the code to help accomplish this: https://github.com/kartikprabhu/marginalia

While annotation systems have the ability to overlay one's site, there's certainly room for serious abuse as a result. (See an example at https://indieweb.org/annotation#Criticism) It would be nice if annotation systems were required to use something like webmentions (or older trackback/pingbacks) to indicate that a site had been mentioned elsewhere, this way, even if the publisher wasn't responsible for the resulting comments, they would be aware of possible attacks on their work/site/page.

Compare this with the fragmention: http://boffosocko.com/about/website-philosophy-structure/#I+try+to+follow