Hypothesis

Several of my courses require the use of the Hypothesis annotation platform. Hypothes.is is an open source, non-profit project designed to develop an open protocol for annotation across the web. It is also specifically focused on supporting academic use. However, because it is an attempt to simulate a layer of the web that doesn't otherwise exist, the technical implementation is less than seamless. I am in touch with the Hypothesis team, and we'll be sharing the results of our experience directly with them for the benefit of future users.

Here are some resources from the Hypothesis website:

• Quick Start Guide for Students
• Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some tips that may be useful from past experience:

• Before you come to class, for use as discussion notes, consider printing off the most recent annotations from your user page, which appears at hypothes.is when you're logged in, or hypothes.is/user/[your username].
• There are two basic ways to access Hypothesis: 1) through the Chrome extension (or Firefox bookmarklet), and 2) by prefixing the web URL you want to annotate with via.hypothes.is/… The Chrome extension is the more stable of the two. The “via” option won't work at all with web pages or PDF URLs that are behind paywalls or other forms of restricted access.
• Don't try to highlight PDFs that are embedded inside webpages. Open the PDF as a separate file in your browser (either from a dedicated URL or by downloading it to your computer first), and annotation should work there.

While comments on others' annotations are not included in post data on the public site, they are accessible through this experimental export tool, and this analytics tool, which will be used for evaluation.