Press

Vincent says the idea came from conversations with Dan Whaley, the founder of an online platform called Hypothesis - the same tool scientists are using to annotate the online text.

The Climate Feedback project opens a new channel of communication. The project uses the Hypothesis online annotation platform to allow scientists to subject media reports about climate change to a process akin to peer review. Scientists can trawl through online documents sentence by sentence, chart by chart, highlighting inaccuracies and misrepresentations or adding context. Hypothesis places these annotations in the public domain, allowing readers to see exactly how the article aligns with the latest science. The scientists also provide a score for scientific credibility; the average of these scores, converted into a simple scale, is presented along with a pithy summary of the credibility of article.

The engine room asked me to take a look at how the book could be put online, to facilitate this conversation online, and try to make the book a little more engaging for people we’d love to learn from and hear from. This blog post is a summary of what we learned along the way.

Climate change is arguably the most urgent story in human history, but journalism has struggled to address the threat. This week, an exploration of new efforts by the press to understand and explain the science – and to get you involved.

I also like hypothes.is because it is an open project. I don’t just mean that it allows the content of annotations to be shared creating open discussion, though it does, and I like that. I don’t just mean that it works on the open web rather than within the confines of a single site, though it does, and I like that. I just don’t mean that it’s Open Source, though it is, and I like that. And I just don’t mean that it’s supporting open standards, though it is, and I like that. What I really like is the openness in discussing the projects goals, approaches, plans that can be found on the project wiki and blog.

Dan Whaley, the founder of Hypothes.is, said future iterations of the tool will address this by creating group modes or channels. This would allow a Hypothes.is user to visit Bjorn Lomborg’s op-ed and quickly isolate only the annotations of the Climate Feedback Project’s team of scientists. It will also allow the project to restrict its membership only to those scientists it has vetted for commenting under its name. The long-term goal, Whaley said, “is to have high quality content discoverable publicly as an annotated layer over the Web.”

Nimmt man den Twitterstream als Fenster zur Welt, so war heute auf der SWIB14 – Semantic Web in Libraries Conference (#swib14) der Webannotator von hypothes.is das Thema. Es ist schwer einzuschätzen, wie erfolgreich er bisher ist. Der Echtzeit-Annotationsstrom für öffentlich sichtbare Annotation weist derzeit noch nicht auf eine allzu hohe Nutzungsintensität hin. Es ist jedoch zu erwarten, dass sich das, sofern die technische Performanz das zulässt, bald ändert.

So what is web annotation? It’s very simple – it’s a way of attaching comments, criticism and so on directly to original content on the web. Unlike conventional comment threads, which are often a distant scroll away from the text to which they refer, annotations appear right next to the original. And since annotations reside in hypothes.is, they are not subject to the censorious whims of the owner of the original content.

We’re pleased to announce that the powerful annotation plugin developed by the folks at Hypothes.is is now a fully supported feature in Scalar books. Good for reader responses, collaborative authoring and even copyediting, Hypothes.is allows users to highlight, comment on and form discuss threads around selections of text in a Scalar book.

Vincent partnered with the web application Hypothes.is that is creating a browser plug-in, so that Climate Feedback’s scientists and experts can annotate news stories, blogs and scientific articles with community-reviewed commentary, references, and insight. Each article is rated overall for its accuracy.