Blogs

Sharing social annotation insights.

Read our latest resources, best practices, upcoming events, and thought leadership articles.

Annotating all Knowledge: Adventures in Interoperability

The Annotating All Knowledge Coalition was founded as a forum for accelerating the development of a pervasive interoperable annotation layer across all scholarly works. Figuring out what, exactly, an interoperable annotation layer means was one of the first goals of the coalition. We took the first steps towards defining what an interoperable layer looks like and how it should operate at our Face to Face meetings at FORCE2016 and I Annotate. So what are the next steps?

Participants in both events felt strongly that the best way to move forward was to “Just do it”, that is, identify a use case where you have a need to share annotations across: tools, content, platforms, workflows.

By memartone | 9 February, 2017
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Hypothesis: Meeting the Audrey Test for Educational Technology

Anyone working on or with educational technology should take the work of Audrey Watters—widely known as the “Cassandra” of #edtech—very seriously. If your work withers under Audrey’s critical gaze, you’ve got more work to do. In that spirit, I wanted to hold Hypothesis up to the kind of scrutiny that Audrey might provide.

Back in 2012, Audrey posted “The Audrey Test”: Or, What Should Every Techie Know About Education? on her must-read Hack Education blog. The Audrey Test includes a short list of questions that she suggests every #edtech project, product, or company should answer in order to meet the high expectations we should all hold when we are working on educational tools that engage in what we should think of as “high stakes environments with other people’s children.”

How does Hypothesis fare in The Audrey Test?

By Nate Angell | 9 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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