Many of the  questions I had for Jeremy Dean, Director of Education at hypothes.is, had more to do with the mechanics of annotation online than the educational implications of such a tool, or with Jeremy’s particular trajectory as an alt-academic.  In preparing to annotate Roland Barthes this week, I familiarized myself a bit with the hypothes.is platform by watching some of the videos and reading the tutorials posted on their site.  One of the videos provided a talk that Dan Whaley gave at the Personal Democracy Forum in 2013 regarding the potential annotations have to democratize information.  Open Annotation was mentioned during the talk and I had not really heard of this before.  With a cursory web search, I discovered the Open Annotation Collaboration’s website and also wanted to know more about the early failures of open annotation on the web as a massive endeavor.  I located this article on The Scholarly Kitchen site.  It seems 2013 was a big year in online annotations (Open Annotation Collaboration completed the project in 2013 and the article I cited above was published in 2013 and the first iAnnotate conference was held in this year).

Using hypothes.is to annotate was an interesting experience and it was my first go at online annotation.  Writing in books and on printed articles using pen, pencil, highlighter, and post-it note has been my annotation practice, but I enjoyed seeing the variations of contributions from my classmates and can see the potential of this tool for scholarly discussion and collaboration.  Though, as Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker point out in their piece, “Whipping Boys Explained: Literary Annotation and Digital Humanities” annotations could grow too abundant to really mean anything and plenty will get lost in the “noise” of it all.  However, isn’t this true of the web in general?  I am regularly in awe of the sheer abundance of knowledge and information growth in the world today, but I don’t foresee an end to the exponential growth anytime soon and it just because it won’t be found through a search engine’s algorithm, doesn’t mean the practice shouldn’t be undertaken.  Bauer and Zirker have used annotations in their undergraduate classes to increase engagement with texts, but strive to establish a framework for scholarly annotations.  As already stated in previous posts, this course is really my first opportunity to engage with texts at a level considered “close reading” and I fully continue to admit that it makes me somewhat uncomfortable.  I feared that my annotations weren’t making that great of a contribution or that I wasn’t really getting at the point in annotating a Barthes text.  Previously, my annotations were private and for me only, while now anyone on the web could see what I was thinking in the margins.  I’m interested to see how I engage with Melville’s text online: will it be easier to consider than a Barthe’s text? 

Some of the questions I had for Jeremy are:

• What is open annotation and how does hypothes.is embody it?
• What other systems are out there and what were their evolution?
• What problems has hypothes.is experienced along the way?
• What are the intentions of web annotation?
• What preservation plans does hypothes.is have?
• How is hypothes.is different from other platforms?  Inter-operability and Ubiquitous?  Data collection and sales?
• What is the existential ethos of hypothes.is?
• How does one find annotations outside of the hypothes.is platform?

I realize I am writing this post past its due date, but life got in the way this week.  So, while I did not get to ask Jeremy any of my questions this past week in class, he was gracious enough to encourage the class to reach out to him and continue the conversation.  And, he’s available on Twitter.  On which he shared a video of ours truly, Jeff Allred, discussing social annotation (where I must again admit, that I have great anxiety over engaging with “theoretically dense, philosophically rich, formally experimental text” like Barthes!).  Impostor syndrome?