[annotator-dev] Notes on Annotations from seminar

Sun Mar 24 00:40:19 UTC 2013

Hello,

I'm going to a discussion about annotations in academia next week, and
would like to give a lightning talk about Annotator and hypothes.is to
raise awareness.   Are there recent screenshots or mockups I should
use ?

SJ

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 1:21 AM, Randall Leeds <tilgovi at hypothes.is> wrote:
> Sorry for top posting (also, I'm cross-posting to annotator-dev), but
> you all wrote small novels here.
>
> I'd just add that Hypothes.is is still very much built on top of Annotator.
>
> In the past week I have broken out two plugins: *
>
> - Threading [0]
>   This implements discussion threading on annotations and has only one
> outstanding code dependency in the h application that I think I can
> eliminate by a non-invasive change to Annotator. It requires jwz.js
> [1] for the `mail.messageThread()` function. The rest is implemented
> through vanilla Annotator events, though currently the Annotator
> viewer doesn't know anything about the threads, it could be made to.
>
> - Cross-domain bridge [2]
>   This lets us implement our UI in an iframe with minimal changes to
> the main application. It provides an easy way to share annotations
> between widgets. It depends on jschannel [3]. I'd like to expand it in
> any way that's helpful. Eventually, this could lead to mashups of
> annotation tools. There's lightweight extensibility provided through
> the configuration for fine-grained sharing and merging of annotation
> properties across browser security domains and windows.
>
> I also just took 15 minutes and proved to myself that I could
> re-enable the Annotator bubbles with our sidebar on the page as well.
> It was easy. At this point, most of our code is not overriding
> Annotator in complex ways anymore, but augmenting it in surgical ways,
> or overriding methods to simply disable features straight away (such
> as the editor and viewer widgets). I'll open some issues for making
> this configurable and for documenting our embed code. We can start to
> flesh out the integrations.
>
> I'll see what I can do to break our sidebar widget out into a separate
> plugin as well, so that the embed code can be a normal Annotator embed
> with a custom plugin config and some additional CSS.
>
> In other words: ** Don't worry so much about designing one right
> thing. Let's design (and implement) many things. **
>
> You should not view these interfaces, Hypothes.is and vanilla
> Annotator, as mutually exclusive!
>
> That said, all the feedback is *greatly* appreciated.
>
> So: Yo, dawg. I heard you like annotations, so why don't we get some
> accounts turned on and we can start annotating some PDFs about
> annotation interfaces?
>
> -R
>
> * This stuff still needs to bake a little bit and solidify and we'll
> try to get it all working with upstream Annotator. Everything needs
> tests. Patches welcome. Offer extends forever.
> [0] https://github.com/hypothesis/h/blob/develop/h/js/plugin/threading.coffee
> [1] https://github.com/maxogden/conversationThreading-js
> [2] https://github.com/hypothesis/h/blob/develop/h/js/plugin/bridge.coffee
> [3] https://github.com/mozilla/jschannel
>
> On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 7:35 PM, Dan Whaley <dwhaley at hypothes.is> wrote:
>> Jake,
>>
>> Thanks for taking the time on these notes below, it's really appreciated.
>> I'll respond inline below and cc this to our dev list for the benefit of
>> others that are helping us think through these same questions.
>>
>> On Mar 19, 2013, at 4:07 PM, Jacob Hartnell <jake.hartnell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hey Dan,
>>
>> Here's some of the notes I've pulled together from research I've been doing
>> over the past couple of days. Forgive me if many of these things are either:
>>
>> Obvious
>> You already know them
>> Are part of upcoming plans and just haven't been implemented yet.
>> Poorly articulated (in which case, I can rephrase them)
>>
>> What you've laid out is actually very clear.  Thank you.
>>
>> At the moment, we are actually still considering using Hypothes.is (there
>> are certain elements of the UI we prefer, especially for shared
>> annotations), but I do have some feedback for you.
>>
>> Annotation changes a great deal between use cases: Students in classrooms
>> will use hypothes.is differently than scientists doing peer review on an
>> article. In our use case students will be making annotations on top of the
>> book. As simple as this sounds, it's a bit complicated and that's what I
>> hope to flush out in this email.
>>
>> In the classroom there are actually two different use cases at hand: private
>> note taking verses online class discussion. Private note taking is very
>> different from shared annotation that takes place in class discussion or
>> collaborative annotation. In From Personal to Shared Annotations (attached),
>> one of the authors noted, "People often annotate paper documents as they
>> read them, especially if they are responsible for assimilating the content.
>> They underline text, write notes in the margins, place asterisks by content
>> they want to find again, and otherwise create a personal geography of the
>> reading materials." Other studies have also noticed that the great majority
>> of personal annotations are simply highlights or underlines.
>>
>>
>> (I'll just mention as a side note, that Cathy Marshall, the principal author
>> of the paper you cite above will be attending and speaking at the workshop
>> in April.)
>>
>> One of our primary objectives, and our engagement strategies is to design a
>> high quality personal research tool based around annotations, highlighting,
>> tagging and so forth.  I believe I mentioned some of this in my presentation
>> Saturday, but let me point out a few things.
>>
>> 1) We just launched personal annotations to our dev branch last night and
>> are testing it internally.  We think of this as "visibility".  Personal,
>> private group or global channel.  Groups will come a bit later this spring
>> or early summer.
>> https://github.com/hypothesis/h/wiki/visibility
>>
>> 2) We have a number of additional features targeted at our Personal research
>> releases A & B on our roadmap.  They include a "my annotations" view,
>> various sorting and filtering options, PDF support (just launched this
>> weekend), highlighting and favoriting.  Also, the ability to link to an
>> annotation.
>> https://github.com/hypothesis/h/wiki/Roadmap
>>
>> 3) We think we understand some of the key features that people want, because
>> we've heard others ask for them, or they seem intuitively obvious-- but we'd
>> love your perspective on this, and any further guidance you have to offer.
>> We know we haven't thought of everything-- far from it.
>>
>>
>> I think there's a difference between annotations as reading and annotations
>> as writing. When participating in discussion around an area of the text,
>> more thought is put into a post. Private annotations are different, and I
>> think Hypothes.is should equally address them as well as it doesn't shared
>> annotations (since annotations can easily move from private to shared).
>>
>>
>> Completely agree. :)
>>
>> I'd even go further:  We *won't* succeed unless we are also a high quality
>> personal research tool.  And yes, per the below-- you'll be able to toggle
>> visibility.
>>
>>
>> UI notes:
>>
>> The UI doesn't support highlighting very well. Obviously, for the overall
>> mission of hypothes.is this isn't as important as the discussions but for
>> use in our application it's really important. A lot of students highlight
>> without making a comment. In addition, this is not necessarily content that
>> students want to share (except to show in aggregate, perhaps like the Kindle
>> does—"122 people highlighted this passage").
>>
>> Highlighting is covered under linking here-- though it may need its own
>> stub.  There are some sketches, a few  contributed by a recent volunteer,
>> Abel, that we haven't fully assimilated ourselves… not finished by any
>> means.
>> https://github.com/hypothesis/h/wiki/Linking-to-an-annotation
>>
>> There needs to be a private annotation mode. Moreover, it should be easy to
>> switch between private and shared annotations. It also should be optimized
>> for the differences between personal annotation and shared annotation.
>>
>> One of the reasons we've leaned towards annotator, is that while the layout
>> isn't as optimized for shared annotation and discussion, it's better suited
>> towards private annotation, and allows us to support both… though it's also
>> far from ideal in this regard.
>>
>> We don't think of it as being in a mode, we think of creating annotations
>> that have different visibilities.  You can take a previously private
>> annotation and toggle it to globally visible.  That may be a one-directional
>> move?
>>
>> Better support/UI integration for different annotation flavors: comments and
>> highlights.
>>
>> Students don't always attach a comment to a text selection.
>>
>> Yes, this is targeted for the "advanced editing" set of features on the
>> Roadmap.
>>
>> (I'll just say here that the feature sets on the roadmap are just
>> approximate groupings of related elements for the purpose of organization--
>> in actuality, we'll gather elements from these various groups into releases
>> as we move forward.)
>>
>> Especially while reading, most students only highlight with no comments.
>>
>> Check out the highlight feature in Mac OSX Mountain Lion Preview, maybe in
>> "private mode," annotations could support highlighting with different a
>> similar workflow.
>>
>> Highlighting, per above.  Happy to review different design approaches.
>>
>> Different color highlights need to be easily supported.
>>
>> Sure.  Color might be a kind of tag that carries a style with it.
>>
>> Tagging also needs to be easily supported, our experiment relies a lot on
>> the ability to use tags. Annotator has this functionality which is one of
>> the reasons we were considering using it over Hypothes.is.
>>
>> "Advanced editing" on the roadmap.  Again, anything in annotator is already
>> available to hypothes.is at the storage layer.  Thus, the only thing that
>> needs to be created is the UI to support it.  This is not too terribly much
>> work, but we need to think through exactly the approach we want to take.
>>
>> For example, we wanted to have a "flag" tag. If you flag a portion of the
>> text there is something wrong with it. Either, it's not useful, unclear, or
>> contains an error. This data is not shared with the class and used to help
>> improve the textbook.
>>
>> Our thinking is that this goes in a "moderation release".  We have some
>> really rough early mockups.  Flagging we imagine might be highly
>> customizable.
>>
>> Students in classrooms will use hypothes.is differently than scientists
>> doing peer review on an article. Permissions need to be an essential part of
>> the flow. It needs to be easy to switch between personal and shared modes.]
>>
>> Seamless.
>>
>> There also needs to be an easy way to create, join, and switch between
>> shared annotation groups. (Obviously you are working on the group
>> functionality)
>>
>> Groups. Yep.
>>
>>
>> Here are some other things I've found in some articles I've read lately
>> (I've attached them to the document and highlighted some interesting
>> passages). I think Hypothes.is does a pretty good job of addressing them,
>> but there's always room for improvement. [My thoughts are in brackets.]
>> These come from section 6.4 of the Annotation thesis I attached.
>>
>> Developers should focus on designing annotation systems that present the
>> best, most productive annotations rather than attempting to display all
>> annotations made (Wolfe, 2008). [It should be easy to switch between
>> different modes (private, group, top-rated, everyone)]
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, this lumps together very distinct concepts though:  private & group
>> modes are visibility related, "top-rated" is a sort criteria on what you can
>> see.  everyone is the third visiibility parameter… i call it the global
>> channel.
>>
>> ON/OFF: Participants expressed the view that it is absolutely critical that
>> readers could turn the annotations off very quickly and easily, perhaps in
>> one single click.
>>
>> Once we launch the extension this week or early next, you will see that even
>> the sidebar is not active until the extension page action icon is clicked.
>> i.e. We agree.
>>
>> This functionality should also probably be reflected somehow in an
>> embeddable version of annotation, without the extension-- maybe simply via
>> an icon or other element of the web page we're embedded on.
>>
>> It would also be important to have the annotations turned off by default,
>> because annotated texts distract the readers, especially the first-time
>> readers. [Though the heat map and the pointers are cool and fairly
>> unobtrusive on a website, in a book they can still be annoying/distracting.
>> Perhaps by clicking on the discussion box icon they can be toggled on/off.
>> Every reader is different, but this bothers some people. Usually, people
>> want to read an article or chapter first AND THEN check and see what others
>> are saying about it.]
>>
>>
>> Yes, per above.
>>
>> DON'T HAVE TOO MUCH ON SCREEN: In their study of annotation layouts,
>> Zellweger, Regli, Mackinlay, and Chang (2000) found that many readers
>> objected to annotations that interrupted the flow of the primary text.
>> Cabanac et al. (2005; 2007) moreover noted that interlinear annotations may
>> potentially be confused with the primary text. [You guys do a pretty great
>> job at this!]
>>
>>
>> Thank you. :)
>>
>> Keep sending me questions and I'll do my best to find answers and opinions
>> on them. In general, the feedback to hypothes.is has been really positive!
>> It's exciting to watch the progress on it.
>>
>>
>> Great!
>>
>> I'm really glad there's an opportunity to work together.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> Jake
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> <p812-marshall.pdf>
>>
>>
>> <AnnotationThesis2010.pdf>
>>
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> annotator-dev mailing list
> annotator-dev at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/annotator-dev
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/annotator-dev
>

--
Samuel Klein          @metasj          w:user:sj          +1 617 529 4266

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 1:21 AM, Randall Leeds <tilgovi at hypothes.is> wrote:
> Sorry for top posting (also, I'm cross-posting to annotator-dev), but
> you all wrote small novels here.
>
> I'd just add that Hypothes.is is still very much built on top of Annotator.
>
> In the past week I have broken out two plugins: *
>
> - Threading [0]
>   This implements discussion threading on annotations and has only one
> outstanding code dependency in the h application that I think I can
> eliminate by a non-invasive change to Annotator. It requires jwz.js
> [1] for the `mail.messageThread()` function. The rest is implemented
> through vanilla Annotator events, though currently the Annotator
> viewer doesn't know anything about the threads, it could be made to.
>
> - Cross-domain bridge [2]
>   This lets us implement our UI in an iframe with minimal changes to
> the main application. It provides an easy way to share annotations
> between widgets. It depends on jschannel [3]. I'd like to expand it in
> any way that's helpful. Eventually, this could lead to mashups of
> annotation tools. There's lightweight extensibility provided through
> the configuration for fine-grained sharing and merging of annotation
> properties across browser security domains and windows.
>
> I also just took 15 minutes and proved to myself that I could
> re-enable the Annotator bubbles with our sidebar on the page as well.
> It was easy. At this point, most of our code is not overriding
> Annotator in complex ways anymore, but augmenting it in surgical ways,
> or overriding methods to simply disable features straight away (such
> as the editor and viewer widgets). I'll open some issues for making
> this configurable and for documenting our embed code. We can start to
> flesh out the integrations.
>
> I'll see what I can do to break our sidebar widget out into a separate
> plugin as well, so that the embed code can be a normal Annotator embed
> with a custom plugin config and some additional CSS.
>
> In other words: ** Don't worry so much about designing one right
> thing. Let's design (and implement) many things. **
>
> You should not view these interfaces, Hypothes.is and vanilla
> Annotator, as mutually exclusive!
>
> That said, all the feedback is *greatly* appreciated.
>
> So: Yo, dawg. I heard you like annotations, so why don't we get some
> accounts turned on and we can start annotating some PDFs about
> annotation interfaces?
>
> -R
>
> * This stuff still needs to bake a little bit and solidify and we'll
> try to get it all working with upstream Annotator. Everything needs
> tests. Patches welcome. Offer extends forever.
> [0] https://github.com/hypothesis/h/blob/develop/h/js/plugin/threading.coffee
> [1] https://github.com/maxogden/conversationThreading-js
> [2] https://github.com/hypothesis/h/blob/develop/h/js/plugin/bridge.coffee
> [3] https://github.com/mozilla/jschannel
>
> On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 7:35 PM, Dan Whaley <dwhaley at hypothes.is> wrote:
>> Jake,
>>
>> Thanks for taking the time on these notes below, it's really appreciated.
>> I'll respond inline below and cc this to our dev list for the benefit of
>> others that are helping us think through these same questions.
>>
>> On Mar 19, 2013, at 4:07 PM, Jacob Hartnell <jake.hartnell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hey Dan,
>>
>> Here's some of the notes I've pulled together from research I've been doing
>> over the past couple of days. Forgive me if many of these things are either:
>>
>> Obvious
>> You already know them
>> Are part of upcoming plans and just haven't been implemented yet.
>> Poorly articulated (in which case, I can rephrase them)
>>
>> What you've laid out is actually very clear.  Thank you.
>>
>> At the moment, we are actually still considering using Hypothes.is (there
>> are certain elements of the UI we prefer, especially for shared
>> annotations), but I do have some feedback for you.
>>
>> Annotation changes a great deal between use cases: Students in classrooms
>> will use hypothes.is differently than scientists doing peer review on an
>> article. In our use case students will be making annotations on top of the
>> book. As simple as this sounds, it's a bit complicated and that's what I
>> hope to flush out in this email.
>>
>> In the classroom there are actually two different use cases at hand: private
>> note taking verses online class discussion. Private note taking is very
>> different from shared annotation that takes place in class discussion or
>> collaborative annotation. In From Personal to Shared Annotations (attached),
>> one of the authors noted, "People often annotate paper documents as they
>> read them, especially if they are responsible for assimilating the content.
>> They underline text, write notes in the margins, place asterisks by content
>> they want to find again, and otherwise create a personal geography of the
>> reading materials." Other studies have also noticed that the great majority
>> of personal annotations are simply highlights or underlines.
>>
>>
>> (I'll just mention as a side note, that Cathy Marshall, the principal author
>> of the paper you cite above will be attending and speaking at the workshop
>> in April.)
>>
>> One of our primary objectives, and our engagement strategies is to design a
>> high quality personal research tool based around annotations, highlighting,
>> tagging and so forth.  I believe I mentioned some of this in my presentation
>> Saturday, but let me point out a few things.
>>
>> 1) We just launched personal annotations to our dev branch last night and
>> are testing it internally.  We think of this as "visibility".  Personal,
>> private group or global channel.  Groups will come a bit later this spring
>> or early summer.
>> https://github.com/hypothesis/h/wiki/visibility
>>
>> 2) We have a number of additional features targeted at our Personal research
>> releases A & B on our roadmap.  They include a "my annotations" view,
>> various sorting and filtering options, PDF support (just launched this
>> weekend), highlighting and favoriting.  Also, the ability to link to an
>> annotation.
>> https://github.com/hypothesis/h/wiki/Roadmap
>>
>> 3) We think we understand some of the key features that people want, because
>> we've heard others ask for them, or they seem intuitively obvious-- but we'd
>> love your perspective on this, and any further guidance you have to offer.
>> We know we haven't thought of everything-- far from it.
>>
>>
>> I think there's a difference between annotations as reading and annotations
>> as writing. When participating in discussion around an area of the text,
>> more thought is put into a post. Private annotations are different, and I
>> think Hypothes.is should equally address them as well as it doesn't shared
>> annotations (since annotations can easily move from private to shared).
>>
>>
>> Completely agree. :)
>>
>> I'd even go further:  We *won't* succeed unless we are also a high quality
>> personal research tool.  And yes, per the below-- you'll be able to toggle
>> visibility.
>>
>>
>> UI notes:
>>
>> The UI doesn't support highlighting very well. Obviously, for the overall
>> mission of hypothes.is this isn't as important as the discussions but for
>> use in our application it's really important. A lot of students highlight
>> without making a comment. In addition, this is not necessarily content that
>> students want to share (except to show in aggregate, perhaps like the Kindle
>> does—"122 people highlighted this passage").
>>
>> Highlighting is covered under linking here-- though it may need its own
>> stub.  There are some sketches, a few  contributed by a recent volunteer,
>> Abel, that we haven't fully assimilated ourselves… not finished by any
>> means.
>> https://github.com/hypothesis/h/wiki/Linking-to-an-annotation
>>
>> There needs to be a private annotation mode. Moreover, it should be easy to
>> switch between private and shared annotations. It also should be optimized
>> for the differences between personal annotation and shared annotation.
>>
>> One of the reasons we've leaned towards annotator, is that while the layout
>> isn't as optimized for shared annotation and discussion, it's better suited
>> towards private annotation, and allows us to support both… though it's also
>> far from ideal in this regard.
>>
>> We don't think of it as being in a mode, we think of creating annotations
>> that have different visibilities.  You can take a previously private
>> annotation and toggle it to globally visible.  That may be a one-directional
>> move?
>>
>> Better support/UI integration for different annotation flavors: comments and
>> highlights.
>>
>> Students don't always attach a comment to a text selection.
>>
>> Yes, this is targeted for the "advanced editing" set of features on the
>> Roadmap.
>>
>> (I'll just say here that the feature sets on the roadmap are just
>> approximate groupings of related elements for the purpose of organization--
>> in actuality, we'll gather elements from these various groups into releases
>> as we move forward.)
>>
>> Especially while reading, most students only highlight with no comments.
>>
>> Check out the highlight feature in Mac OSX Mountain Lion Preview, maybe in
>> "private mode," annotations could support highlighting with different a
>> similar workflow.
>>
>> Highlighting, per above.  Happy to review different design approaches.
>>
>> Different color highlights need to be easily supported.
>>
>> Sure.  Color might be a kind of tag that carries a style with it.
>>
>> Tagging also needs to be easily supported, our experiment relies a lot on
>> the ability to use tags. Annotator has this functionality which is one of
>> the reasons we were considering using it over Hypothes.is.
>>
>> "Advanced editing" on the roadmap.  Again, anything in annotator is already
>> available to hypothes.is at the storage layer.  Thus, the only thing that
>> needs to be created is the UI to support it.  This is not too terribly much
>> work, but we need to think through exactly the approach we want to take.
>>
>> For example, we wanted to have a "flag" tag. If you flag a portion of the
>> text there is something wrong with it. Either, it's not useful, unclear, or
>> contains an error. This data is not shared with the class and used to help
>> improve the textbook.
>>
>> Our thinking is that this goes in a "moderation release".  We have some
>> really rough early mockups.  Flagging we imagine might be highly
>> customizable.
>>
>> Students in classrooms will use hypothes.is differently than scientists
>> doing peer review on an article. Permissions need to be an essential part of
>> the flow. It needs to be easy to switch between personal and shared modes.]
>>
>> Seamless.
>>
>> There also needs to be an easy way to create, join, and switch between
>> shared annotation groups. (Obviously you are working on the group
>> functionality)
>>
>> Groups. Yep.
>>
>>
>> Here are some other things I've found in some articles I've read lately
>> (I've attached them to the document and highlighted some interesting
>> passages). I think Hypothes.is does a pretty good job of addressing them,
>> but there's always room for improvement. [My thoughts are in brackets.]
>> These come from section 6.4 of the Annotation thesis I attached.
>>
>> Developers should focus on designing annotation systems that present the
>> best, most productive annotations rather than attempting to display all
>> annotations made (Wolfe, 2008). [It should be easy to switch between
>> different modes (private, group, top-rated, everyone)]
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, this lumps together very distinct concepts though:  private & group
>> modes are visibility related, "top-rated" is a sort criteria on what you can
>> see.  everyone is the third visiibility parameter… i call it the global
>> channel.
>>
>> ON/OFF: Participants expressed the view that it is absolutely critical that
>> readers could turn the annotations off very quickly and easily, perhaps in
>> one single click.
>>
>> Once we launch the extension this week or early next, you will see that even
>> the sidebar is not active until the extension page action icon is clicked.
>> i.e. We agree.
>>
>> This functionality should also probably be reflected somehow in an
>> embeddable version of annotation, without the extension-- maybe simply via
>> an icon or other element of the web page we're embedded on.
>>
>> It would also be important to have the annotations turned off by default,
>> because annotated texts distract the readers, especially the first-time
>> readers. [Though the heat map and the pointers are cool and fairly
>> unobtrusive on a website, in a book they can still be annoying/distracting.
>> Perhaps by clicking on the discussion box icon they can be toggled on/off.
>> Every reader is different, but this bothers some people. Usually, people
>> want to read an article or chapter first AND THEN check and see what others
>> are saying about it.]
>>
>>
>> Yes, per above.
>>
>> DON'T HAVE TOO MUCH ON SCREEN: In their study of annotation layouts,
>> Zellweger, Regli, Mackinlay, and Chang (2000) found that many readers
>> objected to annotations that interrupted the flow of the primary text.
>> Cabanac et al. (2005; 2007) moreover noted that interlinear annotations may
>> potentially be confused with the primary text. [You guys do a pretty great
>> job at this!]
>>
>>
>> Thank you. :)
>>
>> Keep sending me questions and I'll do my best to find answers and opinions
>> on them. In general, the feedback to hypothes.is has been really positive!
>> It's exciting to watch the progress on it.
>>
>>
>> Great!
>>
>> I'm really glad there's an opportunity to work together.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> Jake
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> <p812-marshall.pdf>
>>
>>
>> <AnnotationThesis2010.pdf>
>>
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> annotator-dev mailing list
> annotator-dev at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/annotator-dev
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/annotator-dev
>

-- 
Samuel Klein          @metasj           w:user:sj          +1 617 529 4266