Tag: hypothesis

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By way of experiment I have added, where they exist, annotations of my postings to the posting itself. Such annotations are made in Hypothes.is an online annotations tool, with social features.

Hypothes.is uses the W3C standard for annotations, and the service has an API. That opens it up for experimentation. For instance there is a Obsidian plugin that pulls in my annotations and brings them to my notes.

I now experimentally use the API to check for annotations that exist for a single posting. If such annotations exist, a page with a single blogposting will mention the existence of annotations just above the comments, and provide a link to them. For this I adapted the template for single postings in my WordPress theme. See the image.


The number of annoations, if any, is shown beneath individual postings above the comments.

Like with comments this opens up a surface for people to interact with my blog and have that interaction made visible on my site. As with comments and trackbacks of old, this also opens up a possibility for spam, especially as there is no way yet for me to moderate such annotations to be shown, nor a way to prevent them in general.

Hypothes.is has existed for a decade and reached 2 million annotated articles early this year. It’s relatively unknown, and not commonly used. This at the moment should be enough ‘protection by obscurity’ for now. Maybe in time I will reconsider, there are valid reasons to do so.

Existing users of Hypothes.is don’t need a link like I added to my postings, they see that in their browser already (depicted below). However it may encourage other readers of this blog to check out those annotations and perhaps create their own.

In a next step I may aim to list the existing annotations, and their authors, not just link to them, but not immediately. First I’ll think some more about how I might use the Hypothes.is API for other things in my personal workflow.


A screenshot of how a logged-in Hypothes.is user in their browser sees a post on this site that has annotations.

Is it possible to annotate links in Hypothes.is that are in the Internet Archive? My browser bookmarklet for it doesn’t work on such archived pages. I can imagine that there are several javascript or iframe related technical reasons for it. An information related reason may be that bringing together different annotations from different annotators is hard, as they might al be annotating a different archived version of the same page.

Yet in some cases this would be very useful to be able to do. For instance, Manfred Kuehns blog was discontinued in 2018, and more recently removed entirely from Blogspot where it was hosted. The archived versions are the only current source for those blogpostings. This means there is no ‘original’ page online anymore to gather the annotations around.

I see Chris Aldrich has annotated posts from that same weblog by Kuehn, maybe he can shed some light on it.

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Julian Elve writes about capturing notes from various sources, in response to my new little script to capture web articles directly from my feedreader into my markdown notes. I will need to reply to it more later, but to signal I’m continuing the conversation, I want to respond to one thing immediately, specifically to this bit

Hypothes.is (only just starting to play with this, but if I can’t see how I can process what I might capture with the tool, there is no point in starting down this track)

Julian Elve

I follow along with Chris Aldrich’s Hypothesis stream in RSS and it’s highly informative for me to do so. Similar to Julian I have concerns starting to use it myself, if it means adding a silo next to my regular workflow. The type of interaction and annotation I have/do with a source text I normally do locally. Unless it can be a PESOS (Post Elsewhere Syndicate to Own Site) flow, exchanging that current value of processing things locally for merely the potential for interaction and conversation is likely a bad trade-off for my learning.

Hypothesis does have an API, which offers a way forward perhaps. A few weeks ago I added at least tracking who else is annotating my blogposts to my list of things to create. Julian’s nudge maybe means reevaluating that starting point, and aiming higher to also fetch whatever annotation I might make myself (I do have Hypothesis running in my Firefox browser, despite not using it much).

It starts I think with playing with the Hypothes.is API anyway. I have a day off later this week, hopefully I can use part of it to fire up Postman and explore the Hypothes.is API.

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I’ve been musing about the use and value of a shared annotation tool like Hypothes.is. Chris Aldrich kindly responded in detail on my earlier questions about Hypothes.is. Those questions, about silo-effects, performativity if the audience for annotations isn’t just me, and what group forming occurs, are I think the key issues in judging its use to me. Circumventing the silo, integration with my own internal workflows and preventing performativity so fragile explorative learning may take place are the key concerns, where the potential of interaction and group forming in stimulating learning are the value it may yield.

I don’t yet readily see how I can use hypothes.is for annotation, as I think it would largely mean a switch away from annotating locally to doing so in-browser or rather in Chrome which is less a browser and more an adtech delivery vehicle. In general the browser is not a helpful environment for me when it comes to making notes. I now close a browser tab after clipping a web text to markdown which I then annotate locally later.

A first useful step I do see is bringing how others annotate my postings back to my own notes. Currently there are 66 annotations on my blogposts, stretching back three and a half years (mostly by the same person). I should be able to pull those in periodically through Hypothes.is’ API, or from an RSS feed, and integrate them into my local notes or perhaps show them alongside my blogposts (maybe by generating WebMentions about them, as I did here manually). As I have stated often, blogging means having distributed conversations and if Hypothes.is is where some of those conversations originate it is worthwile to make them visible.

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I’m taking the liberty to put three questions before Chris Aldrich about his Hypothes.is experiences, after reading Annotation by Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia. Kalir and Garcia make much of the social affordances that annotation can provide. Where annotation is not an individual activity, jotting down marginalia in solitude, but a dialogue between multiple annotators in the now, or incrementally adding to annotators from the past. Like my blogposts are an ongoing conversation with the world as well. Hypothes.is is one of the mentioned tools that make such social annotating possible. I am much more used to individually annotating (except for shared work documents), where my notes are my own and for my own learning. Yet, I follow Chris Aldrich’s use of Hypothes.is with interest, his RSS feed of annotations is highly interesting, so there’s a clear sign that there can be benefit in social annotation. In order to better understand Chris’s experience I have three questions:

1. How do you beat the silo?

Annotations are anchored to the annotated text. Yet in my own note making flow, I lift them away from the source text to my networked set of notions and notes in which emergent structures produce my personal learning. I do maintain a link to the right spot in the source text. Tools like Hypothes.is are designed as silos to ensure that its social features work. How do you get your annotations into the rest of your workflow for notes and learning? How do you prevent that your social annotation tool is yet another separate place where one keeps stuff, cutting off the connections to the rest of one’s work and learning that would make it valuable?

2. What influence does annotating with an audience have on how you annotate?

My annotations and notes generally are fragile things, tentative formulations, or shortened formulations that have meaning because of what they point to (in my network of notes and thoughts), not so much because of their wording. Likewise my notes and notions read differently than my blog posts. Because my blog posts have an audience, my notes/notions are half of the internal dialogue with myself. Were I to annotate in the knowledge that it would be public, I would write very differently, it would be more a performance, less probing forwards in my thoughts. I remember that publicly shared bookmarks with notes in Delicious already had that effect for me. Do you annotate differently in public view, self censoring or self editing?

3. Who are you annotating with?

Learning usually needs a certain degree of protection, a safe space. Groups can provide that, but public space often less so. In Hypothes.is who are you annotating with? Everybody? Specific groups of learners? Just yourself and one or two others? All of that, depending on the text you’re annotating? How granular is your control over the sharing with groups, so that you can choose your level of learning safety?

Not just Chris is invited to comment on these questions obviously. You’re all invited.


Opticks, with marginalia, image by Open Library, license CC BY