Category: Technology

A Partnership to Bring Open Annotation to eBooks

Today we are announcing a partnership to bring open, collaborative, cross-platform annotation to eBooks. Together with NYU Libraries, NYU Press, Evident Point, the Readium Foundation and the EPUBjs project, Hypothesis will be working to bring annotation to EPUB, the standard format for digital books.

Digital books represent an enormous class of content which at present cannot be collaboratively annotated with others. Combined with the recent work that the W3C has done to standardize annotation, this represents an essential next step in bringing a high quality open annotation implementation to books everywhere.

By dwhly | 9 March, 2017
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Showing Orphaned Annotations

Reuniting annotations with their targets in real time is core to the recently standardized web annotation model. This is fundamental to web annotation’s key benefits: that annotations lay over the web, can enable the collaborative annotation of documents like PDFs, can be searched and discovered across documents and websites, and, importantly, are under users’ control instead of publishers’. Learn how Hypothesis’ ensures annotators can find annotations that have become unanchored to content.

By arti_walker | 1 March, 2017
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Annotation Is Now a Web Standard

Over the years, many have tried to bring us web annotations. On 23 February 2017, things took a giant leap forward when the W3C, the standards body for the web, standardized annotation.

Yesterday, on February 23, things took a giant leap forward when the W3C, the standards body for the Web, standardized annotation.

Twenty four years after Marc Andreessen first built collaborative annotation into Mosaic and tested it on a few “guinea pigs” before turning it off, annotations have finally become first-class citizens of the web.

By dwhly | 24 February, 2017
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Opening Meta

Yesterday, the scholarly communication + AI startup Meta signed an agreement to be acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Aside from the initial news a few weeks ago and Joe Esposito’s article in the Scholarly Kitchen, I’ve seen few people remark on it.

But it’s a big deal.

A serious piece of scholarly infrastructure is being made open, free and effectively non-profit. Meta has built a cutting edge system to mine scholarly papers new and old, and allow the data to be employed in diverse ways–predicting discoveries before they’re made, projecting the future impact of papers just hours old, and unlocking the potential for innumerable applications applying computation at scale across scientific literature. In what must have taken extraordinary patience, persistence and a lot of finesse, they managed to secure access to some of the most strategic closed content in the scholarly world.

By dwhly | 16 February, 2017
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Our Millionth Annotation

It was getting close to midnight and the Hypothesis team was watching the counter of total annotations tick up: 999,646…999,752…999,845…by 10:37pm Pacific Time it was 999,959 and we knew we’d reach one million annotations that night. People all over the world were busy taking notes using Hypothesis—students, journalists, researchers, scientists, scholars—most without knowing that our team and the annotation community on social media were rooting for their work. Countdown tweets for a #millionannotations were starting to gather an audience. Who would add the millionth annotation?

By Nate Angell | 4 February, 2017
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Who says neuroscientists don’t need more brains? Annotation with SciBot

You might think that neuroscientists already have enough brains, but apparently not. Over 100 neuroscientists attending the recent annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SFN), took part in an annotation challenge: modifying scientific papers to add simple references that automatically generate and attach Hypothesis annotations, filled with key related information. To sweeten the pot, our friends at Gigascience gave researchers who annotated their own papers their very own brain hats.

But handing out brains is not just a conference gimmick. Thanks to our colleagues at the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), Hypothesis was once again featured at SFN, the largest gathering of neuroscientists in the world, attended by well over 30,000 people in San Diego Nov 12-16, 2016. The annotation challenge at SFN was a demonstration of a much larger collaboration with NIF: to increase rigor and reproducibility in neuroscience by using the NIF’s new SciBot service to annotate publications automatically with links to related materials and tools that researchers use in scientific studies.

By memartone | 31 January, 2017
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Introducing Search and Profiles

Up until now, Hypothesis users have been able to annotate, reply to, and read through annotations. These basic capabilities have generated an explosion of activity: as of yesterday, our community has created a total of 882,053 annotations!

With this release we’re introducing two key features to help you navigate this new layer of information spreading across the web: Search now makes it easy to filter all annotations by keyword, tag, group, or linked page. Profiles finally provide a true home for users and groups—both for themselves, and for others that want to explore their annotations.

By arti_walker | 14 December, 2016
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