What’s That Sound? A Million People Annotating

To all the people out there adding your thoughts, questions, memes, and corrections to the margins of digital texts, let’s celebrate our latest milestone together: One million people are annotating with Hypothesis! What does it mean that one million individuals are annotating? More and more people are harnessing the power of social annotation to teach and learn, to publish, to conduct research, to fact check and report news, to keep personal notes, to advance open source technology, and so much more.

And, of course, one million people annotating adds up to a lot of annotations. Just since July, when the community of annotators reached a record 25 million annotations, we’ve climbed to 28 million. With annotations coming so fast, we’re now just celebrating the bigger leaps forward — see you at 50 million?

AnnotatED by the numbers

Hypothesis social annotation is now in use in over 1,000 schools across the country and around the globe, and we’re meeting and partnering with more schools all the time, many of which join the AnnotatED community. Social annotation is a robust pedagogical tool that many teachers, instructional designers, and students find transformative when it comes to reading and understanding texts and building learning communities, whether that’s in the humanities, the social sciences, STEM, or the arts.

What’s next?

We have long believed that social annotation makes reading active, visible, and social, and that it leads to increased community, shared learning, and higher levels of critical thinking. As part of our ongoing effort to better understand the benefits of social annotation, we have been collaborating with Indiana University on a multi-year research project to investigate how social annotation connects with reading and writing practices for undergraduate students in core English literature and composition courses for majors and non-majors. The scope of the study is four semesters of data collection and analysis, but it will continue to generate additional research activities all the way through 2025.

Initial study data are already coming in. Read the first two in a series of guest blog posts from the research team: one from Dr. Remi Kalir, who is also the inaugural Hypothesis scholar in residence, and another from Dr. Justin Hodgson from our research partner institution, Indiana University.

It takes a village to raise awareness

Since the summer of 2020, we have been fortunate to be able to bring many amazing educators to the screen on Liquid Margins to share best pedagogical practices for using social annotation. Each episode showcases educators and instructional designers from a variety of disciplines, such as English, math, science, history, world languages, and more. And we will continue to produce episodes and book guests to highlight the great work being done in both higher education and K12 classrooms.

And now, onward to the next million annotators, who we know are out there and will add their invaluable voices to “the Great Conversation.”

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