The Margin #2: New Features and Open Positions

Since we last updated you we’ve accomplished a tremendous amount. We’ve shipped key enhancements (and have many more in store), made life easier for developers, hired staff and secured substantially more funding. We’re excited to bring you some of our recent news, and hope you might connect us to some new teammates.

Highlights

• We’ve launched a new feature that allows direct linking to annotations (read our blog post and try it!).
• You can now annotate local PDFs that aren’t on the web (read our blog post).
• We’ve dramatically increased the performance of heavily annotated pages.
• We’ve made it much easier for developers to install and work with our application.
• In April we had the first face to face meeting of the Annotating All Knowledge coalition in Portland, now over 70 partners strong.
• We recently hosted our 4th annual I Annotate conference in Berlin (video playlist here).
• Outside developers have been building innovative things against our codebase and API, like Hypothesis Aggregator from Kris Shaffer and Hypothes.is Collector from John Stewart.
• We’ve been featured in the NY Times, Newsweek, Fast Company, Poynter and more.
• On August 2nd we hosted an Educator Institute at the University of Colorado Denver.
• We closed on $1.9M in new funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Omidyar Network.
• This fall, we’ll be alpha testing a prototype app for the Canvas Learning Management System, and we’re looking for volunteers!

We have open positions for:

• Director, Marketing
• Director, Business Development
• Director, Fundraising
• Developer

Direct linking

A direct link is a key new feature that lets you travel to an annotation in the context of the annotated document.

You can try it right now by clicking this link.

Notice that direct links can also be embedded as links in annotations themselves, allowing users to travel from within one document to within another.

If you have installed the Hypothesis Chrome Extension, the linked annotation will activate the extension. If you don’t, the annotation will display on the document using our “via” proxy (read about via here).  To try this new feature, click on the “Share” button of any annotation. The direct link will be preceded with the hyp.is domain. For more details about this feature you may want to read our blog post, or Christina Englebart’s post.

Performance and architecture improvements

We have improved the speed of annotations appearing on a page. You may notice the improvements especially in pages with many annotations.

PDFs are now identified by their “fingerprint” and not by URL. This helps ensure that annotations will flow across copies of the same PDF. You can read more about it in our blog post.

We’ve also been working on decoupling our client code from our server code. If you are a developer, you will notice it’s much easier now to work on the Hypothesis client and the browser extension.

I Annotate 2016

We held our first I Annotate conference outside of the US in Berlin this past May, co-located with the W3C Web Annotation Working Group’s semi-annual face to face.  It was our fourth annual annotation event– we also held one in 2013, 2014 and 2015.  A key goal of this year’s conference was to bring annotation to the larger international community, and to start to build these relationships and networks across the annotation ecosystem.  The conference was well attended, and we are happy to report that we had ~150 attendees coming from 18 countries!

We’d like to acknowledge our sponsors, Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom and Springer Nature, whose generous support made this year’s event possible.  We’d also like to thank all of the presenters and panelists for their contributions; their talks clearly demonstrated that web annotation is continuing to gain traction as a compelling collaborative activity with a diverse range of uses and users. You can read about the event here.  Recordings of the conference sessions are posted on YouTube here: I Annotate 2016 Video Recordings

AAK

In December 2015 we announced the formation of the Annotating All Knowledge Coalition — an informal partnership of like-minded scholarly publishers, platforms, libraries, and technology organizations that are working together to bring about an open and interoperable conversation layer over the web for the purpose of advancing scholarship and research.  We launched the coalition with ~40 organizations and, as of today, we now have 71 coalition partners.

An AAK steering committee was formed to provide leadership and guidance for the coalition, and the coalition had its first face-to-face meeting in Portland, OR in April, 2016 as part of the FORCE 11 annual conference. We made strides on defining attributes of interoperable annotations and in defining use cases that can drive development.  Coalition members have formed partnerships to start exploring how annotations created across different platforms can be shared.

The W3C is looking for implementations of the Open Annotation Data Model and Web Annotation Protocol standard to validate that the W3C working group recommendation is implementable and consistent (e.g. no specification mistakes).

To learn more about the AAK Coalition, visit the the AAK Working Group website, or send us an email to coalition@hypothes.is

Prototype App for Canvas LMS

This fall, we’ll be alpha testing a Hypothes.is prototype app for the Canvas Learning Management System. It enables native annotation of web pages and PDFs within the LMS, and allows students to submit sets of annotations for grading and feedback by teachers. By the spring term we plan to allow for automatic Hypothes.is account creation based on student Canvas identities. In this pilot year for our LTI app, Instructure has brought Hypothes.is on as a Certified Partner. If you work at a school using Canvas and are interested in being part of the alpha cohort, please reach out to education@hypothes.is.

Hypothesis is growing!