Press

Today, Hypothes.is posted a 15 minute video (embedded below) where several experts share some of their perspectives (Why the interest in the topic? Biggest Challenges, Future Plans, etc.) on the topic of web annotation. The video was recorded at the recent W3C TPAC 2014 Conference in Santa Clara, CA.

Hypothes.is is an annotator, the tool designed to advance commenting and discussions on every piece of content on the Internet (scientific or non-scientific). From the point of view of academia, it might be seen as another tool to make science more open and to make scientific communication faster.

Mr. Waters, meanwhile, sketches out several broad topics of current emphasis for the scholarly-communications-and-information-technology program. He and his colleagues are keenly interested in the ability to annotate scholarship online, he says; Mellon has made serious investments in annotation tools and the development of open annotation standards by the university community and projects like Hypothes.is, which just received a two-year, $752,000 grant from the foundation to look into digital annotation in humanities and social-science scholarship.

What has been most interesting to us, just over this last year, has been a fairly significant burst of interest in the utilization of annotation in a research context. For instance, among the scholarly communication grants The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is considering for funding this summer, approximately half involve annotation in one guise or another. This is quite striking.

To do this, Hypothes.is aims to create a cross-platform annotation systemOpens in a new window that would essentially function as a layer on top of the existing web, allowing users to comment on pages, pictures, video, documents, or data. This open annotation would allow discussion to take place on any web real estate, not beholden to those who control the pages.

Hypothes.is showed their impressive contribution with two open source projects with huge potential: Epub.js and their own hypothes.is.

Dan Whaley is the founder of Hypothes.is, a company that promises an open annotation web experience where anyone can comment on anything.

One example comes from the San Francisco non-profit hypothes.is, where Books in Browsers’ Peter Brantley is based. The company is working to develop “an open platform for the collaborative evaluation of knowledge” — annotation. Their explanatory video takes you from from the beginning of recorded information to our current moment of the search for universal collaborative commentary.

In this episode, Peter Brantley, the director of scholarly communication at the start-up Hypothes.is, talks with host Stewart Wills about the firm’s efforts to build an open annotation layer on the Web, his thoughts on how in-line annotation differs, in both spirit and potential, from the more common practice of online comment streams, and some possible applications in scholarly communication, publishing, and peer review.

Was Mosaic nicht schaffte, will nun das Projekt Hypothes.is erreichen. 2011 als Crowdfunding-Projekt gestartet, macht das Nonprofit-Projekt seitdem immer wieder kleine Fortschritte. Am Ende soll eine verteilte, offene Plattform stehen, über die Nutzer wie im Peer-Review-Verfahren der Wissenschaft einzelne Sätze markieren und Informationen bewerten können. Statt Kommentar-Inseln auf einzelnen Websites oder bei Twitter entstünde ein über das Netz waberndes Band an Anmerkungen – so zumindest die Idee.