Engage in Events with Hypothesis Social Annotation

Multicolored lights leaving trails in the night sky.

Take three easy steps to engage people in conference or event presentation topics — before, during, and after sessions — using Hypothesis, the collaborative annotation tool.

Events like professional conferences are now offering more ways to engage in what happens at the event beyond being there live: streaming video, virtual sessions, social media. Another way to participate is to join in annotating documents related to the event that other participants are also reading, and annotating. By annotating together, you are reading together — maybe not at the same time or in the same space, but focused together on the same document in the shared context of the event. Like questions and answers after presentations and hallway conversations, annotated discussions can bring event topics to life — and to give them life after the event is over.

You can use Hypothesis to annotate common documents together with other folks who are attending events — in person or virtually, formally or informally. The first step is when key documents are identified that are related to the event. Once key documents are identified and shared, the whole community can annotate, including both event attendees and those who are not attending. Discussion can take place on top of the documents themselves, and also be shared out to other channels — like social media — to bring more people into the conversation. Considering sharing links to specific annotations with the hashtag of your event.

Annotating Events with Hypothesis

Watch a short video to see Hypothesis in action. Prefer text? Read the same material right below the video, with linked resources.

Read annotations

You can read Hypothesis annotations by visiting any web document with annotation enabled. Your event may provide special links to annotation-enabled documents, or you can always view annotations by pasting the web address for any web document into the “Paste a Link” function at the top of the Hypothesis website.

Create annotations

Making your own annotations is easy:

  1. Create a free Hypothesis account and add Hypothesis to your browser. You can add an extension to Chrome, or drag a bookmarklet to your toolbar in other browsers.
  2. Visit the list of annotated discussions for your event, make sure Hypothesis is activated in your browser, and highlight text to make your own annotations.
  3. You can also respond to other annotations in the Hypothesis sidebar. Join the conversation!

Share and Explore Annotations

  1. Share the unique link to any annotation by clicking on the share icon at the bottom of every annotation. Share on social media and add a hashtag related to your event, or copy that annotation’s link to share by other means.
  2. In addition to visiting the document and opening the Hypothesis sidebar, you can explore all the annotations on a document by copying its web address (URL) and pasting it into the CROWDLAAERS dashboard to get an overall view of the annotated discussion.

Examples