Press

University of Minnesota faculty Bodong Chen describes the role Hypothesis annotation played in his experiments to incorporate collaboration in a graduate course: In this design case, an instructor architected a digital learning environment to facilitate collaborative discourse in an online graduate-level class. Given traditional Learning Management Systems offer uninspiring support for dynamic social interactions, the designed environment harnessed emerging technologies in open textbooks, web annotation and team communication to foster a collaborative learner discourse that was dynamic, distributed, and coherent. The purpose of this paper is to describe the designed digital environment, as well as key design decisions leading to the designed environment.

My project has been to implement digital annotation (using Hypothesis) into my upper level course in anthropological theory, last taught in the spring of 2016. I was in the middle of this course during my last update, and now I have had almost a year to reflect and plan for the next offering of this course in spring of 2018. The outcomes were so successful that I would not want to teach the class again without using digital annotation. Adding digital annotation into the course led students to dig deeply into difficult texts, which led to two distinct results: higher grades on tasks involving close reading and theoretical thinking; and, more nebulously but also importantly, greater class camaraderie and discussion.

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.

Climate scientists and technologists are collaborating on fighting fake news with a site called climatefeedback.org.

Climate scientists have volunteered by the dozens to review the accuracy of stories about climate change. Now they're collaborating with computer experts to develop ways to scan the internet for fake and misleading stories about climate.

In my previous post I outlined what students should be annotating for in a complex text or novel. But what about the how?

Just recently Francis Ford Coppola, the director, released an entire book filled with his notes as he was making the movie. That’s right. Even the director of The Godfather engaged in annotation.

Hypothes.is can help journalists collaborating on a project or investigation to collect, organise and discuss their research in one place.

Non-profit organization Hypothes.is wants to bring a new, conversational layer of digital annotation to the web. Investigative journalists are a community that can make powerful use of it.

Observers of the digital humanities often see them as shifting literary study away from close reading. However, the digital humanities also present opportunities to refine our capabilities for close reading. These digital reading tools, often useful to scholars, may be just as helpful in the classroom. Students working on long Victorian texts often resist close reading. Ideally, they will have multiple low-pressure opportunities to practice this skill. Open annotation provides a frequent, collegial assignment to help students gain the habit of turning to specific moments in the text for their examples. Hypothes.is is an open-source project facilitating group annotation of any online text; it requires users to anchor any comment in a specific text passage while enabling privacy, conversation threads, and easy grading. This essay offers a commentary on open annotation in the classroom, growing out of the particular challenges and rewards of the course where it was used. Students’ experiences of the text were indisputably enriched by their work with Hypothes.is, but the assignment works best with careful framing and support due to students’ unfamiliarity with the technology.