There have been interest for the annotation tool hypothes.is inside the HackYourPhD community on Facebook so I wrote this short description to give you an idea of this tool. Hope you will enjoy my choice to base this post on the post titles of the hypothes.is blog.
If webpages are the main layer of the web, this annotation tool resides in a layer that is over the webpage layer.
Just select some text and a gentle popup enables you to write an annotation. Add some tags (for you and for the discussion), choose if you keep it for you (Only Me) or make it public.
Then, the annotation is linked to the webpage so it will load with hypothes.is at each time. All public annotations are displayed to anyone and can be identified.
That’s it, at the condition you installed the Chrome extension or grabbed the bookmarklet for Firefox or using the proxy (reload this page enabling proxy).
This tool is stable, but there is still development made on it as well as on tools around it. I invite you to read about the ideas that have led its development, in order to have an idea of what can be done in the future with this tool or around this tool (there is an API indeed).
Blog post titles from 2012 et February 2016 [1] give an overview of the ideas that lead the development of this tool.
Focus is made on embedded annotations, that are cross format, cross-browser and enable to annotate news, law, books, educational resources, educational resources again.
A special focus is made on enabling scientific publication peer-review for example in biomedical research, climate science, or neuroscience. And indeed, Wikipedia too.
Finally, to quote the developers team, “really, you can annotate anything”.
Development is made with the W3C hence an effort of standardisation.
This has led 60 scholarly publishers to form the Annotating all knowledge coalition around hypothes.is.
Over the next several years this coalition will be working together to define, design and implement a common framework for scholarly collaboration from peer-review through post-publication discussion, all based on open standards.
A great job has been done in order to synchronize annotations between local and remote pdfs. And because Science involve math a lot, inline latex formula are supported. Finally, annotation is part of the glose or discussion around science, so groups feature has been added.
Once one knows how to use hypothes.is, what to do? Clearly, there is momentum for using it in education and in the process of scientific discussion: use it for peer-review or for extracting findings from scientific papers. or simply use it for the simple purpose of annotating the web, and launch discussion around content, directly on the text! The stream is a good place to start!
Detailled manual for hypothes.is
[1]: backup of the webpage, using Wayback Machine by archive.org on February 26, 2016
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