On February 15 I attended a talk by Peter Brantley to learn more about Hypothes.is. Brantley is Director of Scholarly Communications for Hypothes.is. He was previously the Director of the Digital Library Foundation, and has also served on the Board of the International Digital Publishing Forum. He's long been an advocate for open Web standards and maximal access to online information.
So, what is Hypothes.is? Let's go straight to the source. Please take a moment to read this passage closely:
"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." [Bold mine]
Whereas Wikipedia thrives on anonymous line edits, Hypothes.is aims to leave a digital trail of people's thought processes as they traipse across the Web. At the "I Annotate" conference this April, a wide swath of the digital publishing community will take the next steps toward building this infrastructure.
Brantley was speaking at the Friday Afternoon Seminar Series at Cal's Information School, a long-running event hosted by Professor Michael Buckland. It was a small crowd, mostly of people who knew him or knew about him (like me). Questions fell along two main lines: what types of data would be possible to annotate? and who would own the resulting annotations? Let's take each in turn.
1. What is possible to annotate?: As the passage above indicates, Hypothes.is focuses on the curated annotation of written words that are rendered in a stable digital form. The Talmud, the world's first collaboratively annotated document, serves as one source of inspiration for this effort.
The word is the root unit, and so in this sense Hypothes.is has a pre-Web orientation. I've written often about how scholarly communication should evolve to enable "born digital" means of sharing and creating knowledge. We need to move "beyond the PDF" and create "scholarly HTML."
So it may seem that my aims and those of Hypothes.is are contradictory. Not so. The infrastructure Hypothes.is building is one step along this path.
Why? Because the Talmud's collaborative edits required a very high degree of physical document management. This was possible and successful, but only with great care and within a relatively small (in proportion to the entire world) slice of geography. Today the Talmud could be thoughtfully critiqued online, by any interested believers located anywhere at all. Indeed, Brantley noted that leaders of many faith communities see great potential in Hypothes.is.
The ends--collaborative annotation, building community--have not changed. But the means have leapt beyond the printed page. Hypothes.is will build an important bridge to the preservation and understanding of Web native content that is 3d, visual, or otherwise not oriented by text. This is one place to start.
2. Ownership of annotations: If I annotate a blog post, do I own the annotation or does the blog owner? If that owner redistributes my annotation must I be compensated? Who owns what when? Questions of this type arose on a few occasions. The answer is that nobody knows and the rules will change.
Questions like this are conservative--let's not move too far without knowing the lay of the land. That's reasonable in most facets of life but short-sighted in a few. This is a chicken and egg problem. If we don't move at all until the rules are clear the rules may never change since we never moved.
Knowing this, Brantley reiterated his call for what many of us have long advocated: the evolution of copyright law to reflect the realities of the digital age. We will get there, in fits and starts, and Hypothes.is will be part of the reason why.
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