Tag: highlights

In reply to highlight.js, an extension to highlight text on web pages by James G.

Nice project, James! I’m not sure I get the distinction you make between this and an annotation extension, as highlighting is annotation too and the pop up box even calls the highlights annotations. One question: do you apply the W3C Web Annotation Data Model recommendation? That would make highlighting with this potentially interoperable with e.g. Hypothes.is. Or allow interaction with the Hypothes.is API further down the line.

I don’t presently have plans to expand this into an annotation extension, as I believe that purpose is served by Hypothesis. For now, I see this extension as a useful way for me to save highlights, share specific pieces of information on my website, and enable other people to do the same.

James G.

Piers Young posts some of his snippets and highlights from a book he’s reading. I currently struggle reading non-fiction e-books, and one of the thresholds is highlighting stuff on my Kindle. This, because I know that I am sharing that data with Amazon (who even ‘helpfully’ but really awfully can tell me what most others highlighted, as if that is of any help at all in any reading situation), while I never had gotten around to figuring out how to access my highlights in a way I can re-use for research or writing later.

Piers post, showing me how you could turn highlights into a blogpost, bringing it home that way, led me on a search for my own highlights. It turns out that at read.amazon.com/kp/notebook you can find all your highlights and remarks. Something to play with on how to put it to good use.

Reading Piers leaves me with a question though. What about Russian rainbows? “Russians are raised to see two types of blue and, as a result, see eight-striped rainbows. Colour is a lie.” Can you confirm or debunk, Lilia? I don’t doubt that colour is a lie, at all, but an additional stripe in the rainbow? To my eyes the last three (blue, indigo, and purple) are more or less the same colour already 😀 And how does that compare to the notion that blue is a late addition to language, that people learned to really see blue only recently at all? A late addition that the Russian language has even more nuance in? Intriguing!