During this seemingly-endless interregnum when we have e-books that suck at letting us take notes, I buy paper books when I’m doing research. I have a complex little application I’ve endlessly developed over the years that lets me type notes into a plain text editor or OPML-based outliner using a minimal markup. The app turns the notes into a database that I can then slice ‘n’ dice. Someday I’ll get it stable and done enough to publish. And that day is never.

A couple of years ago I wrote a Chrome extension (“Kindle Highlights Exporter”) that scrapes all of the passages you’ve highlighted with your Kindle, exporting them as a csv, xml, or json file. The only problem is that I seem to be the only person it works for. More precisely, it crashed for the only person I ever showed it to, my supersmart developer nephew. It still works for me, though. If you want (yet another) chance to laugh at me, feel free to download it and install it. Suckers.

So, how about if someone were to write some software that lets me import photographs of the pages of a book that I’ve highlighted in, say, yellow. The app finds the highlighted portions of each page, looks for the page number, does the requisite OCR, and returns a well-marked-up set of those annotations. (These days, outputting in the Open Annotation standard, as well as the usual suspects, would be extra cool.) That way, when I’m done with a book, I could snap images of all the pages with highlights and get a list at the end, instead of doing what I do now: type them in as I read.

I’d give it a try, but processing images is waaay beyond my hobbyist-programmer capabilities. As for the possible copyright violation: OH FOR HEAVENS SAKE WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH US? (Note: The previous sentence should not be construed as legal advice.)

In any case, as the digital/networked world continues to develop its superpowers, the mud wall that confines the physical becomes more and more aggravating.

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Ashley Bradford of Critique-It describes his company’s way of keeping review and feedback engaging.

To what extent can and should we allow classroom feedback to be available in the public sphere? The classroom is a type of Habermasian civic society. Owning one’s discourse in that environment is critical. It has to feel human if students are to learn.

So, you can embed text, audio, and video feedback in documents, video and images. It translates docs into HTML. To make the feedback feel human, it uses slightly stamps. You can also type in comments, marking them as neutral, positive, or critique. A “critique panel” follows you through the doc as you read it, so you don’t have to scroll around. It rolls up comments and stats for the student or the faculty.

It works the same in different doc types, including Powerpoint, images, and video.

Critiques can be shared among groups. Groups can be arbitrarily defined.

It uses HTML 5. It’s written in Javascript, PHP, and uses Mysql.

“We’re starting with an environment. We’re building out tools.” Ashley aims for Critique^It to feel very human.

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Jonah Bossewich and Mark Philipsonfrom Columbia University talk about Mediathread, an open source project that makes it easy to annotate various digital sources. It’s used in many courses at Columbi, as well as around the world.

It comes from Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. It began with Vital, a video library tool. It let students clip and save portions of videos, and comment on them. Mediathread connects annotations to sources by bookmarking, via a bookmarklet that interoperates with a variety of collections. The bookmarklet scrapes the metadata because “We couldn’t wait for the standards to be developed.” Once an item is in Mediathread, it embeds the metadata as well.

It has always been conceived of a “small-group sharing and collaboration space.” It’s designed for classes. You can only see the annotations by people in your class. It does item-level annotation, as well as regions.

Mediathread connects assignments and responses, as well as other workflows. [He’s talking quickly :)]

Mediathread’s bookmarklet approach requires it to have to accommodate the particularities of sites. They are aiming at making the annotations interoperable in standard forms.

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Phil Desenne begins with a brief history of annotation tools at Harvard. There are a lot, for annotating from everything to texts to scrolls to music scores to video. Most of them are collaborative tools. The collaborative tool has gone from Adobe AIR to Harvard iSites, to open source HTML 5. “It’s been a wonderful experience.” It’s been picked up by groups in Mexico, South America and Europe.

Phil works on edX. “We’re beginning to introduce annotation into edX.” It’s being used to encourage close reading. “It’s the beginning of a new way of thinking about teaching and assessing students.” Students tag the text, which “is the beginning of a semantic tagging system…Eventually we want to create a semantic ontology.”

What are the implications for the “MOOC Generation”? MOOC students are out finding information anywhere they can. They stick within a single learning management system (LMS). LMS’s usually have commentary tools “but none of them talk with one another . Even within the same LMS you don’t have cross-referencing of the content.” We should have an interoperable layer that rides on top of the LMS’s.

Within edX, there are discussions within classes, courses, tutorials, etc. These should be aggregated so that the conversations can reach across the entire space, and, of course, outside of it. edX is now working on annotation systems that will do this. E.g., imagine being able to discuss a particular image or fragments of videos, and being able to insert images into streams of commentary. Plus analytics of these interations. Heatmaps of activity. And a student should be able to aggregate all her notes, journal-like, so they can be exported, saved, and commented on, “We’re talking about a persistent annotation layer with API access.” “We want to go there.”

For this we need stable repositories. They’ll use URNs.

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Paolo Ciccarese begins by reminding us just how vast the scientific literature is. We can’t possibly read everything we should. But “science is social” so we rely on each other, and build on each other’s work. “Everything we do now is connected.”

Today’s media do provide links, but not enough. Things are so deeply linked. “How do we keep track of it?” How do we communicate with others so that when they read the same paper they get a little bit of our mental model, and see why we found the article interesting?

Paolo’s project — Domeo [twitter:DomeoTool] — is a web app for “producing, browsing, and sharing manual and semi-automatic (structure and unstructured) annotations, using open standards. Domeo shows you an article and lets you annotate fragments. You can attach a tag or an unstructured comment. The tag can be defined by the user or by a defined ontology. Domeo doesn’t care which ontologies you use, which means you could use it for annotating recipes as well as science articles.

Domeo also enables discussions; it has a threaded msg facility. You can also run text mining and entity recognition systems (Calais, etc.) that automatically annotates the work with those words, which helps with search, understanding, and curation. This too can be a social process. Domeo lets you keep the annotation private or share it with colleagues, groups, communities, or the Web. Also, Domeo can be extended. In one example, it produces information about experiments that can be put into a database where it can be searched and linked up with other experiments and articles. Another example: “hypothesis management” lets readers add metadata to pick out the assertions and the evidence. (It uses RDF) You can visualize the network of knowledge.

It supports open APIs for integrating with other systems., including into the Neuroscience Information Framework and Drupal. “Domeo is a platform.” It aims at supporting rich source, and will add the ability to follow authors and topics, etc., and enabling mashups.

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Neel Smith of Holy Cross is talking about the Homer Multitext project, a “long term project to represent the transmission of the Iliad in digital form.”

He shows the oldest extant ms of the Iliad, which includes 10th century notes. “The medieval scribes create a wonderful hypermedia” work.

“Scholarly annotation starts with citation.” He says we have a good standard: URNs, which can point to, for example, and ISBN number. His project uses URNs to refer to texts in a FRBR-like hierarchy [works at various levels of abstraction]. These are semantically rich and machine-actionable. You can google URN and get the object. You can put a URN into a URL for direct Web access. You can embed an image into a Web page via its URN [using a service, I believe].

An annotation is an association. In a scholarly notation, it’s associated with a citable entity. [He shows some great examples of the possibilities of cross linking and associating.]

The metadata is expressed as RDF triples. Within the Homer project, they’re inductively building up a schema of the complete graph [network of connections]. For end users, this means you can see everything associated with a particular URN. Building a facsimile browser, for example, becomes straightforward, mainly requiring the application of XSL and CSS to style it.

Another example: Mise en page: automated layout analysis. This in-progress project analyzes the layout of annotation info on the Homeric pages.

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From hypothes.is:

Hypothes.is will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.

It is based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), O’Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.

Interesting!

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