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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.”

On 1 December, Hypothes.is announced partnerships with more than 40 publishers, technology firms and scholarly websites, including Wiley, CrossRef, PLOS, Project Jupyter, HighWire and arXiv. Whaley hopes that the partnerships will encourage researchers to start annotating the world's online scholarship.

Maryann Martone is Director of Biosciences for Hypothes.is and current President of FORCE11, an organization advancing scholarly communication. She tells us about a new open annotation tool, Hypothes.is, and why the ability to annotate scholarly objects is so important. “To enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge” is the slogan for Hypothes.is, a open annotation layer that allows anyone to annotate anything. With an innovative open source tool, having the ability to annotate published work, be it data, methods or peer review comments, further enhances reproducible science and transparency – an ethos of GigaScience.

Today marks the launch of an informal annotation coalition, organized by the Hypothes.is Project, a W3C Member. W3C is excited to be part of this growing effort of over 40 leading organizations in the technology and scholarly publishing communities, including W3C Members IDPF, MIT Press, and Wiley. The partners in this coalition share a vision of how annotation can benefit scholarly publishing, and of open collaboration for integrating web annotation into their platforms, publications, workflow, and communities. W3C sees an important role for Web Annotations as a new layer of user-generated content and commentary on top of the Web, and across digital publications of all sorts. Today, comments on the Web are disjointed and often disruptive; a unified mechanism for creating, publishing, displaying, and sharing annotations and other comments in a decentralized way can aid in distributed curation, improving the quality of comments that a reader sees for Web content, and improving the reading experience. In parallel, Web users want to organize and remember useful sites on the Web, and want to synchronize their favorite sites across multiple devices, or to share their thoughts about a site with friends or colleagues; Web annotations enable all this by allowing users to make highlights or detailed notes about a site, to add tags for categorization and search, and to share these links and notes across multiple conforming social media services. This is ideal for casual users, or for focused reading circles or classrooms.

The Learning Network has an entire lesson plan devoted to doing it the old-fashioned, analog way — but if you’d like to experiment with doing it digitally, you might look at what Sarah Gross, a high school teacher and contributor to our blog, did recently using Hypothesis with her senior class as they read the Opinion piece “What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech.”

I’ve been writing about my use of Hypothes.is as a collaborative annotation tool this semester with the students in our introduction to literature class (see my ProfHacker post from this summer on my selection process). The tool so far has been a huge success and the students have been getting a lot out of the process.

There’s no doubt that our students will get a lot more practice annotating online. In fact, annotating the Web is nothing new. The developers of Mosaic, one of the earliest browsers from the ’90s, envisioned a Web that anyone could annotate. And there’s no shortage of web annotation tools—AnnotateIt, Bounce, Diigo, Genius, and Marqueed, to name a few. But one tool I’ve been incorporating into my teaching lately is Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is was developed using the standards of the W3C (the major governing body of the Internet), specifically the standards of the W3C Annotation Working Group. The mission of Hypothes.is is to enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge by creating an open platform for the annotation of any web document—images, videos, and data. The easiest way to use Hypothes.is is to find a webpage you want to annotate and paste the URL into the search bar on the homepage of the Hypothes.is website. After that, a sidebar on the right of the screen appears allowing users to begin annotating. If anyone else has annotated the page, their public annotations are visible too. Another way to see what’s been annotated is to scroll through a webpage and then click on any highlighted areas.

Finally, something I haven’t used much yet, but which I imagine could be really useful for close reading, analysis, or debate, is Hypothes.is, an annotation tool for web documents. I really like the fact that this project doesn’t rely on monetizing user data (what Shoshana Zuboff recently called “surveillance capitalism”), and it’s a non-profit that uses open standards and isn’t operating on magical venture capital dust like so many for-profit tech ventures. You can create an account (and don’t have to give away a lot of personal information to do so – all you need is an email address) and in quick order have the ability to highlight passages and add notes. I can imagine this being quite useful for a group of students digging into a web text, but one problem I have with it is that you have a choice of your annotations and highlights being public or private – you can’t have a private group, so far as I can tell. Still, since students don’t need to use their real names, and a course tag can be added to comments to pull them all together, I may try it someday. There are more ideas for using it in the classroom at their blog.

I explain hypothes.is as the ability to annotate line-by-line to any page on the web (kind of like brining Medium everywhere). The original intention of this post was to retell his story from my point of view and sort of go line-by-line from his recollection. Instead, I decided to use this as a test case to use hypothes.is for the first time. You can see that my annotations have also been aggregated to my own Hypothes.is public stream.