We are honored to publish this guest post from our former Hypothesis team member, Heather Staines, who we still collaborate with in her new role at MIT’s Knowledge Futures Group. Heather has the unique quality of being the human who has made the most Hypothesis annotations — 100,000 and counting! Only the venerable SciBot has made more annotations than Heather, and it’s a robot!
Recently, I made my 100,000th annotation with Hypothesis. I know what you must be thinking: Doesn’t she have a life? Why would anyone make 100,000 annotations? Just a few short years ago, I would have dismissed this prospect as preposterous. I disliked reading online and abandoned most online tools at the first hurdle. Yet, here I am, a self-diagnosed annotation addict. (For those of you who don’t know me, I used to work for Hypothesis. Leaving to build open infrastructure didn’t mean that I left the tool behind — far from it!)
Now, you should be aware that I use Hypothesis mainly for private reading, research, and recreation. Those checking my public profile will see that only about 1,000 annotations are in the public layer or in public groups. This underscores the reality that annotations do not have to be public to be beneficial. I use private annotations for all kinds of different purposes, from research to vacation planning to holiday shopping. And I’m working up the confidence to make more public annotations — but hey, why read a blog post about the annotations that I make when you can actually see them!
Follow Heather’s adventures by clicking on her annotations on the text below highlighted in yellow, and then following links in her annotations. If you don’t see highlights, open the Hypothesis sidebar at the upper right and make sure the public layer is selected.
I invite you to “choose your own (adventure) annotation path” across the web! Enjoy!
Annotation is my life!
Scholarly Publishing
Future of the Web
Planning a Road Trip — planning anything!
Getting Braver with Public Annotation
I’d love to hear about your own experiments in annotation. You can find me on Twitter at @heatherstaines.