Press

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 and Google didn’t seem to have an answer to that (some of us should probably do the world a favor and update the outdated wikipedia page comparing web annotation tools).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.

What does “annotating all knowledge” mean for authors and readers of scholarly content? Why is it important for Wiley to participate? Annotating All Knowledge is a coalition driven by the Hypothes.is Project involving over 40 scholarly publishers, platforms, libraries and technology partners. Scholarly publishing is undergoing a sea change. As governments and institutions strive to make the results of research more and more accessible, the publishing industry is adapting. Open Access was an important step towards authors providing unlimited access to their research, and Wiley has fully embraced this. In the meantime, the way readers intellectually engage with the substance of what is written has evolved very little, even as the interpretation of what writing is and how it is represented has broadened. There has been much progress in getting machines to understand things on our behalf, but comparatively little in enabling people to understand each other in more meaningful ways. Social media have given us a plethora of channels through which we can talk about things, allowing thought to spread with efficiency undreamed of even twenty years ago. However, these channels are not designed for depth and analysis. While ‘free’ in the commercial sense, they silo our interactions in exact opposition to the principles on which the Web was founded, namely the democratization of knowledge.

Hypothes.is lets visitors annotate your Web pages, via a pop-out sidebar filled with a Twitter-like stream of visitor comments/links. It’s the perennial idea of re-inventing the classic footer comments box as a uniform annotation layer, something that has been tried many times over the past 20 years. Google ran such a tool for three years before closing it down. Such services tend to end up as dank wastelands filled with Viagra ads, troll spoor and link-rot. But this time might be different. There’s a couple of somewhat workable-looking early W3C standards (more are on the way), new options for moderation and closed group working, and an impressive range of publishers and universities are now planning to discuss how social annotation might proceed for scholarship… "Our goal is that within three years, annotation can be deployed across much of scholarship.”