Press

Climate Feedback, a scientist-led effort to "peer review" the world’s climate journalism, is closing in on its $30,000 crowdfunding target. A successful conclusion to the campaign would bolster one of the most prominent efforts yet to conduct fact-checking via web annotation.

Hypothes.is’s Dan Whaley and EPUB.js lead developer Fred Chasen envision a future where consumers can participate in ongoing and real-time discussions within the ebooks they’re reading.

As longtime readers know, a prime focus on Dot Earth has been testing ways to clarify disputes over consequential science — a need that’s amplified in complex arenas laden by persistent uncertainty.

Earlier this year, a group of climate scientists were outraged about a Wall Street Journal editorial. In an earlier era, they might have written a letter to the editor, or meekly submitted their opinion piece for publication. Instead, they did what scholars have long done in academic circles: they annotated the WSJ broadside.

I am absolutely thrilled to report that you can now link directly to a specific point within any webfile, most anywhere on the web, using the hypothes.is open annotation tool. In my mind this is a game changer, and I’ll tell you why.

Look at Facebook or Twitter and you'll see plenty of links and comments. But, to understand and discuss a post, you have to follow a link, read an article, and return to comment.

Larry Hanley, an English professor at San Francisco State University, is the kind of man who aggressively annotates his books. He believes a particularly beautiful verse of poetry deserves to be underlined; a thought-provoking line of prose requires an equally intelligent comment scribbled next to it.

A solitary bear peers into the ice melting under its feet. A short skim through the text below this classic climate change image is often all it takes for glaciologist Twila Moon to find the words that set her teeth on edge: polar ice caps.

Whenever people have encouraged me to use Hypothes.is for web annotation, my first question had always been, “so how is it different from Diigo?” and Google didn’t seem to have an answer to that (some of us should probably do the world a favor and update the outdated wikipedia page comparing web annotation tools).

“GLOBAL warming is the greatest scam in history.” Denialist headlines like this one litter the internet, confusing the public and frustrating climate scientists.