 Why don't we begin right now? Let me welcome everybody. Greetings and welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you here. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, host, and chief cat herder. And I'm really looking forward to today's conversation about a fascinating and very powerful technology in practice. Let me explain a bit about this week's guests. And I want to make sure you can see this image. Normally I introduce people with a kind of slide, with some text on it. But this time we have a little poster made up by the awesome Lear Lobo, who I want to give a shout out to her for this really nice project. Today we're going to be talking about the technology of web annotation. And this is a technology that lets you annotate a web page, either individually or in groups. It's a powerful technology with a lot of pedagogical potential. There have been different projects doing it. The leading one right now is called Hypothesis. And we have three different brilliant people to help you explain, explore, and see where this is going. I'd like to welcome Jeremy Dean, who works on Hypothesis, Remy Kalyer, who has written software called Crell Layers, which lets you build the top of this, and Amanda Lacostro, who has been doing some great scholarship into annotation how it works and what we can do with it. So let me take this slide down. And one by one, let me bring them up on stage so we can have a panel. And a panel conversation. So first let me bring up Amanda. Amanda, hi, you need to unmute yourself. Can everyone hear me now? Beautifully. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Do you want me to give a brief intro? Actually, tell you what, while I bring it together to folks, why don't you tell us what you're going to be working on for the next year? Sure, no problem. So I think as many of us in higher education do, I wear many hats. My primary research is actually in empathy and virtual reality. So I'm having students in a wide array of classes create virtual reality applications here on campus. I will also be leading workshops on using social annotation platforms. And I'm part of the large Mellon Grant that Book Traces has looking at the history of annotations. So a lot of related digital writing and rhetoric things. Wow, very nice, very nice. And now you're going to be teaching over the next fall and spring? Yes, so I teach at Stevenson University. And this semester I am teaching a grant writing course and a course on Margaret Atwood, which is very exciting. Oh, that's fantastic timing. It's kind of hard to go wrong with that. Well, great. Well, welcome. Welcome to the forum. We're glad to have you as a guest. And let's see, we actually also welcome Nate and Angel. Excuse me, I can't talk. Nate, why don't you unmute yourself and tell us what you're going to be working on for the next year? Oh, hi. Are you hearing me OK? Yes, beautifully. Great. I wasn't really expecting to talk, but I work at the nonprofit organization Hypothesis that makes the web annotation technology. And on this next year, I'm going to be partnering a lot with my colleague Jeremy Dean, who will be up here in just a second to really try to get web annotation into as many hands of educators and students as possible across the United States and around the world. Well, you do great work in that. And I do want to thank you for kicking off a very, very long, involved, and very creative Twitter thread, which you then turn into a great blog post, which was then expanded by Hypothesis. So I want to thank you for that. I'll share a link to that in the chat. Please. And we'll come back to you and bug you about the station. Nate, thank you so much for coming. Remy, welcome. Unmute yourself and tell us what you're going to be working on for the next year. Hey, everybody. Again, my name is Remy Kahlir. I'm an assistant professor of learning design and technology at the University of Colorado in Denver. This coming academic year will be the fourth consecutive year of the marginal syllabus. It's a project that engages educators in interest or professional learning around educational equity topics through social and collaborative annotation. And I'll also be revising a book about annotation that I think some folks in this forum are familiar with that concerns the history of the future of annotation, particularly as it concerns learning. So excited about those projects. Fantastic. As are we all. Thank you, Remy. And I'm glad you could make it. Jeremy, welcome. Unmute yourself. Hello, everybody. What are you going to be working on for the next year, Jeremy? Well, I work at Hypothesis. And we launched an LMS app recently and have added some great functionality to that. So I think my primary job over the next year is going to be working with universities and instructors to have success in the app and work with our pilot program. So we've got a lot of partners lined up for the fall and for the spring. And so I think I'm going to be pretty busy with that. Fantastic. Well, welcome. We're really, really glad you could make it. Friends, the way the forum works is typically I begin by asking one or two questions. And then what happens is the rest of you take over. And all I do is relay questions to the guests because you are full of perspectives and ideas and dreams for the future. And we want to share those. So I'm just going to start off really quickly. But as we start talking, please start coming up with the questions you would like to ask and the comments you'd like to make. And again, to do that, just click at the white strip in the bottom of the screen. Click that question mark button. And already two of you have done this. We'll get some great questions and conversation going. I'd like to start, if I could, by asking if each of you could take a whack at one of these questions, which is, what do you see now as, say, the top one or two best uses of hypothesis? I think there are probably a plethora of uses that you can see in something like the conference agenda for the I Annotate conference that was held in May, in Washington DC. What I can speak directly to is uses in the humanities and in the humanities higher education world specifically. So I think two of the things that I'm very interested in is using social annotation to engage students in what I call, what Kathy Davidson calls, collaboration by difference. And that's learning from each other. So when a classroom or a cross-curricular group is annotating the same text, they bring to the table their own expertise and knowledge that's beyond just that of the instructor. And then you can have some bottom-up learning, some really student-driven, student-led learning, where they're providing resources for each other, multimodal resources, which is really one of my interests in the tool. And the second is for rhetorical analysis in this age of understanding web design and understanding web-based content. Using social annotation software not only to comment on text, but on the design elements of web-based text. So things like font choices, image, video, headers, hyperlinks, page layout, exactly. Using a web-based tool for web-based learning to really explore the medium as well as the message. Brilliant. Those are two very, very powerful uses. Thank you, Amanda. And how about Jeremy or Remy? What would you add to that as well? I can't tell if Remy's there, so I'll give him a chance to prove his existence and go first. I think I'm going to talk about two really polar opposites and on the spectrum of the annotation use. The first is within the LMS and the LMS integration that we have and some affordances that come with tying into the systems of the university. We're doing a lot more work around. And obviously, we've always been sort of a close reading tool for the kind of projects that Amanda talks about that allow for collaboration on top of a document, but also sort of really deep, slow reading. But tying into the LMS, tying into some standards like caliper for metrics, I'm really interested in the way that we can then step back from those close encounters of collaboration and close readings of texts and look at the data of annotation, both how that data can be surfaced to students and leveraged and teachers in their understanding of where students are and also possibly beyond that. So that's one piece. The other piece is kind of the opposite of the spectrum. Outside the LMS, somewhat repeating off of what Amanda was alluding to in terms of this moment that we're in, Hypothesis has always had a really great project associated with us called Climate Feedback, where climate experts go and basically fact check articles about climate change and intervene in the public journalism space and sometimes have gotten retractions from major journalistic organizations. I'm really interested in launching thousands of such projects but really grounded in student expertise. So students are taking courses, say, on the history of the Middle East and then they can go and like this is much like the projects you've seen with Wikipedia where students are editing Wikipedia articles and sort of bringing their knowledge to bear in a public space. I'd like to see Hypothesis using the same way. So people would get to edit the, not just the Wikipedia but the entire web conceivably. Yeah, go to whitehouse.gov and drop some truth. Nice, you heard it here, friends. This is the web-based annotation rebellion begins now. So Remy, by the way, is having some bandwidth issues. So we may have to just hear from him. Remy, do you have enough audio that you can take a whack at the question? So bandwidth may be a problem but Remy will communicate with me via chat and I can relay text back to the rest of you. In the meantime, we have Jeremy and Amanda. So we just go back to, if I can combine the two of you, Jeremy, I wasn't really being sarcastic with my last comment. I'm quite serious about this and I'm inspired in part by what Amanda said via Kathy Davidson. There seems to be, there's a politics to any technology, a wide range of politics. And it seems to me that there are all kinds of potentials to that to unfold that web annotation. So one could use a tool like Hypothesis to and a politician can annotate an opposition politician's website. A student could either share their resentment or their approbation of another political figure. And this is, I mentioned politics with the capital P but this can happen in other ways as well with if we go to a publisher's website or to a company's website. How do you see that politics unfolding right now? You wanna go first? No, okay. No, you go, no, you go. No, I'll pick on you. Go ahead, Jeremy. A very complicated question is something that I've been wrestling with since my days at Rap Genius when that platform was getting in various kinds of trouble for sort of inappropriate uses of annotation, more abuse of use of annotation, less liberatory. But it's a very complicated question. I don't think annotation is immune to the same troubles that Twitter or any other social media platform has. And so I think we need to be responsible about addressing that stuff. And the good thing is that Hypothesis and the folks there for a long time have been really serious about these issues, having internal conversations, having external conversations about what moderation looks like, what rights do the owners of websites have to disallow annotation if they so choose. So we're very open and thinking through it, but I think it's still a very, very complicated question. I mean, I don't know that I know the right answer to whether, for example, basically writing on top of whitehouse.gov today, I would find, not to be completely obvious about my own politics, a sort of liberatory experience, but I could, eight years ago, see it being one that was abusive and inappropriate. And I don't know that I'm the one to make that choice, but so that's in terms of the public. I mean, fortunately for the education application of Hypothesis, I think it's really about local communities and how they monitor themselves. Most annotation education is taking place in private groups in which teachers are the moderators of the content. And so they have some control. And of course it's a classroom so they can set up some expectations and some rules of engagement ahead of time. But also following Kathy Davidson, I don't know where I get this from her, but I've been thinking lately about the idea of, before a community, in this case, a classroom begins annotation as a project, brainstorming together and maybe ratifying some documentation around how are we gonna behave here? How are we gonna treat each other and thinking through that kind of thing deliberately ahead of time, co-with students involved, is a powerful way to kind of set expectations. Really hard to do that on the web at large. But at least Hypothesis, I think in terms of public annotation, is really thinking about that with our community guidelines and the way we set up moderation to try to be, cultivating a culture of annotation. I love the way you bring this right back to the classroom, both theoretically and also so practically. Thank you. I wanna build on that, but Amanda, what's your take? I think Jeremy set me up perfectly for what I was thinking in response to that. And as an educator, I always think of part of my role, especially in classes like digital publishing, when we're really thinking about these questions essential to the course, as creating digital citizens. So I have several assignments that are in the public. I have students live tweet their readings of novels. I have students use Hypothesis on the public stage. I have students use a public course blog that is Creative Commons licensed. And in all of these instances, I talk about the appropriate language used in these spaces. Both the language they're using to communicate to the general public, but also to each other. So anyone who's read YouTube comments or comments on the Chronicle of Higher Education knows that we have a problem with the way that we interact in online spaces. And what a better way to discuss those problems, discuss the kind of bullying and rhetoric and trolling that happens in those spaces than in the classroom. So I like to tell this one kind of humorous anecdote, but I had a student once in a public chat space ask another student, yo, add me on Snap, right? And it was a male student and the female student responded, nah, right? And this was in a classroom space. So it gave me the opportunity to talk about like, is this the appropriate place for this conversation? Is this appropriate language to be using on our course site? What kind of language should we be using in this space? And you can talk about discourse communities and you can talk about kind of code switching and all of these great concepts through those more casual conversations that you then hope that they will transfer and apply to the general public, right? To their Twitter accounts, to their YouTube accounts, to Reddit, God forbid, whatever, right? Well, that's a really good response. And it seems that in part, both of you are talking about ways of using hypothesis in the classroom that are not unique to hypothesis. You're describing how students should treat each other, I mean, offline, face-to-face, as well as online using whatever other technology, email or the LMS. That's really, really powerful. I wanted to follow up, but already we have questions piling in and I want to bring in Peter Wallace who has a really, really good question. Let's add him to the stage, please. All right, can you hear me now? There you are. Welcome. Great. Hi, thanks. And thank you both for all of your work. This is really interesting and engaging and is connecting with questions that I've been thinking about for a long while. So my background is kind of in adult education and participatory communities of education. And I'm really curious to follow up on this question of like, how do we get more people engaged in a more meaningful way of say, you know, writing on whitehouse.gov. Have any of you worked with or seen good examples of structured annotations? Because the problem is often that when there's annotation on a document and everyone's writing on whitehouse.gov, the text becomes indeterminate in length, right? Whereas we did an experiment here at University of Washington in a storytelling class with kind of a hybrid where students were commenting what they saw, but also commenting with particular tags that allowed them to say, okay, I'm seeing a particular use of color here and we were then able to map to a document. Okay, here's a kind of in a snapshot visible map of this document. In a similar way, I've been thinking about, here's a map of the, let's say, the falsehoods in this speech or here's a map of the perhaps proper or improper uses of metaphor and engaging people in that dialogue in a way where it can become immediately visible through annotation as opposed to people writing text. Thanks, that was a long question. That's a great question, stick around, don't go down yet. Who wants to try that? Amanda? I can't say that I've necessarily done this in a space like whitehouse.gov or in a space where you're annotating those kinds of very volatile controversial spaces. But in a course that I think every university in America has in the freshman composition course, students often desire that kind of structure-guided exercise. They don't, just saying annotate this text may not be enough for them to engage. So there's a very popular, frankly not new, kind of concept of annotation called the PI model. So it's point, illustrate, explain, right? So the point would be your idea, your perspective, illustrate that, so the evidence, right? The they say to your I say and the explaining that evidence in connection with your idea, right? So I have actually done some work with lower level students in having them annotate using the PI model. So highlight the author's point, highlight the evidence, highlight their explanation of that, how the evidence connects to their point, and then in the comment section provide your explanation, your links, your tags, where you can tag them, those things as well. So it essentially allows students to reverse outline, if that's a familiar turn to folks, to reverse outline scholarly articles or web-based publications in a way that then allows them to create their own outlines and their own arguments based on those examples or models. Starting with the point, very nice. That was a really interesting way of doing it. Jeremy, do you want to add to this? Sure, I mean, I think Peter, you answered your own question a little bit in terms of thinking about the way that tags can work and you know, man to add to that with other forms of deliberate annotation activity. And one of the cool things about hypothesis I think is that, as I think you said, no, all platforms are political and all platforms might have some bias in their design. But one of the cool things I like about hypothesis is that the annotation window is really, it is another sort of blank page. It is a blank margin in the sense that a teacher can guide students in that space. A teacher can make that unguided, but a teacher can also guide that in all kinds of deliberate ways. And using tags certainly can help filter noise on a particular text. Using tags can also help investigations cohere around a topic. So say you are researching gun control and there's a particular fallacy in gun control arguments and sort of bringing back the freshman comp here. You could identify that in various resources and then have a collection of resources that we're all sort of using the same fallacy. I think the other way to do it is to let students do the inquiry independently, right? So then rather than gather on the, I guess there wouldn't be a climate change document at White House or GOV anymore, but rather than gather on a particular document, you send students off to do independent inquiry and there they sort of have their own space to do the kind of activity I mandated it and it can be brought together through more distant reading as a group. Can you just really quickly, sorry for a follow-up question, but what's your best platform for the tagging that you're talking about? Because I'd love to get more of our instructors thinking about this. And on the climate one, we actually had a really good instructor doing videos and having students respond on a Likert scale for every 30 seconds of the video, whether it was an emotional or intellectual argument, kind of a similar classroom use, but for video in this case. Well, I'm a shill for a hypothesis and we have a tagging feature. So I'll just say that, but I mean there are dozens of plugins to sort of bookmark and do different things to bring resources together, but you can annotate with a tag and I have seen structured annotations that really are only a tag, that is there's no content to the annotations students are really just, they're not bookmarking anymore, right? They are, because that's on that level of the document, they are doing a closer earmark or whatever you want to call that dog earmark dog ear. Thank you, I'll have to look into that. I'm excited that hypothesis has that now. And just one thing I'll say about that, that's really cool is that every annotation, this is one of the really sort of magical things about hypothesis and the web standard that we've helped push through with the W3C, every annotation is a URL. So every time you create an annotation, it's a link that you can send somebody directly to, which as my colleague, Johnny Dell, I'm gonna butcher his, the way he talks about, but he talks about it, if the web is a sort of information fabric, then these annotations are increasing the thread count. And that's an incredibly powerful thing. Perhaps Nate might even be able to jump back in here, but I remember there was a speaker at the I Annotate conference who was doing this for his dissertation work. So he was kind of annotating texts across the web in different spaces and tagging them based on his kind of research goals for his dissertation and then bringing all those annotations together as notes to write the annotation. Maybe Nate remembers the speaker's name, but it was a great use of the platform. Nate, let me know if you can come up with a citation for this. This is terrific. Again, Peter, thank you very much for a really, really great question. Again, if you're new to the forum, this is the kind of conversation that we can have varying from the very practical to the very theoretical to the very scholastic. Thank you again. Thank you very much. And I love that annotation as well. It would intersect with my dissertation work. Good luck. Good luck, sir. We have more questions that are just piling in. So again, if you'd like to ask one, just head to the bottom of the screen and click that question mark button. And in the meantime, while you're thinking and while you're doubtless off annotating pages right now as we speak, I'd like to welcome the awesome Kate Borowski. Let's see if we can bring her up on stage. This is gonna sound like a kindergarten question after the last discussion you had. So I saw a hypothesis demonstrated 100 years ago at a new media conversion thing. And I've loved it from the minute I saw it, but I'm a librarian so I don't have my own students to do this, but I'm working with faculty now who are really interested in doing this. And one of them's here with me. But my question is, I've always been sort of curious, when you use it with undergrads, have you had any problems with students just sort of jumping in and using it? Let's see, I wrote my questions down. How readily do they participate? Do they bounce off each other's comments as well as off the text? And then do you think their comments are more or less thoughtful in the social environment? And you can answer any of those or none of those. Those were just sort of things that I had thought of. If Jeremy doesn't mind, I'm totally gonna do it. Please, Mary. I do this in every single one of my classes from the remedial writing course all the way up to my 400 level courses. So I think I have kind of a lot of examples to share here. I can tell you that as far as jumping in and using it, the web-based platform is the one I've primarily been using, but Jeremy and I actually have just worked with our instructional technologist to add it to our LMS. We now have the Blackboard version of Hypothesis as well. As long as they can easily put in their email address and confirm using the link, that's it. And they're used to doing that from signing up for social media sites, shopping lists, whatever, right? So that actually getting started is very, very simple. I do always recommend giving at least some structure and Gardner Campbell disagrees with me on this, but for the very first time we do it, I always say like 10 annotations and five replies, right? Just so they can kind of get used to their possibilities of the platform. And I give a list of five kind of potential annotation types. I say definitions, right? Defining words or terms you don't know. Multimodal references, so links to videos, links to other websites like Wikipedia, links to images or images themselves. For example, I teach an article that has a reference to 2001 Space Odyssey, which my students don't know. Oh no, no, oh no. I actually explain it to them that it's like Wally. Wally, sorry, maybe not great. So every time I teach that article, someone links to like the trailer for 2001 and the Wikipedia page for 2001 or something like that. And then I also ask for questions. So post questions that you have about the text, like I don't understand what the author's talking about here or I think they're getting at this, but I'm not sure. And what I call provocations. So provocation is a question that's meant to engage the other students in the class in discussions. So like, I disagree with this point for X, Y and Z. What do you think? And last but not least is I encourage, kind of just like blanket like I like this or I think this is cool or like this is neat kind of responses to the text or this is funny or this is sad kind of questions or kind of comments. And again, that's for the lower level students. For the upper level students, I encourage and have seen really strong cross references to other texts we're reading in the class. So I want them to connect across our class and to their other classes. So one of the amazing moments and teaching that I had was in one of my 300 level book history classes, a student linked the content to our previous digital publishing course. So it was actually a Joanna Drucker text that they were linking to an article that was in I think JITP or a hybrid pedagogy, one of those two online pedagogy journals. So they were connecting a piece of scholarship to a full length text that we had read in a different class. So. Wow, that's terrific. Wow. Thank you, that was really helpful. And Kate, is that a student behind you right now? She's a professor. Hello. She all looks so young. This is Amanda Sealing. She is a what recovering attorney and teaching in our criminal justice program and is really good about using technology and getting into teaching and trying new things. So I brought her with me today. Hello, Professor Sealing. Welcome to the forum. We're glad to see you. Thank you. Amanda, thank you. That was really helpful. Well, that was a fantastic question, Kate. Thank you. Jeremy, did you want to add to that? I don't have a lot to add. That was a brilliant response from Amanda. I think I'm gonna get that clip for and put it just that response on our somewhere in our education resources because it was so good. I only had a couple of things. I mean, I do think it's important to be deliberate and there's a lot of different ways to be deliberate in how you introduce sanitation. And I think it matters on the context. Gardener students may be more prepared to just go say something interesting and have great conversations. Other students may need more scaffolding and really depends on the context. But I do think another thing, the only other thing I'll add to Amanda is that being present, being there, engaging with them, modeling, what it's supposed to look like or what you're expecting. The one claim I can never make about hypothesis, which is obviously death in that tech industry is it's not gonna make your life easier. It could create more work for you because you're gonna be engaged with your students and engaging with your students in that it's gonna require some level of attention. In that case, if we're gonna talk about the cutthroat nature of business, is there, can hypothesis or other annotation tools soak up some of our practices and other technologies? I mean, can we use web annotation to do some form of discussion software or instead of a discussion board, that kind of thing? Oh yeah, hypothesis is your answer for everything. You won't need Twitter anymore. You won't need Facebook. You won't need the email forum. Yeah, because we want all these conversations to be grounded in text. You won't need Reddit. Yeah, once we have video, you won't need Flipgrid and no offense to Flipgrid or whatever voice thread. You'll be able to add voice and video in the margins of text, which is where at least especially us in the humanities want to anchor our conversations. But I do think it is a replacement for the discussion forum. I find the discussion forum to not be very conducive to conversation, authentic conversation and engagement between teachers and students and students in each other. And I think annotation is more conducive to having something more like authentic conversation one can have in a face-to-face classroom where folks have the book open and you're talking about text and you're meeting each other through the text and having actual conversation. To the very least, I'll replace that. I don't know about Twitter yet. So I'm going to push back a tiny bit. I don't think that it replaces face-to-face conversation. In fact, I use a hypothesis specifically to better structure my face-to-face time with students. So I will assign a collaborative reading, from let's say, Wednesday to Monday. And then I review all the students' highlights and comments, as Jeremy said, engage with their highlights and comments. And then the area of the text where no one has highlighted, that's what I teach. Because typically, that is the spot that they didn't understand. Brilliant. Just to make clear, I wasn't suggesting that this was going to replace face-to-face. I was suggesting that... I was just, I'm just going to reiterate it. In terms of platforms, I think, in terms of extending the kind of interaction one can have face-to-face, I think in terms of authentic type of interaction online, that this is closer than Twitter or discussion forums gets. So my best example of this is E.M. Foresters, The Machine Stops, it's a short story written in 1919, I think. Incredible. It has a section where one of the characters is talking about all of the kind of great periods in history that she's going to talk about in her online lecture, very pressing piece. And no one ever highlights this because all the references she's making are fake. They're fictional time periods that the author has created, but the students don't get that. They think that they look them up and they can't find them, so they think that they just are wrong or they don't know or they don't share in that academic discourse of these terms. So no one ever highlights that paragraph. And I didn't realize that they didn't get the joke until I saw that no one highlighted that paragraph. Oh, wow. So that's what I spent time on in class was talking about what E.M. Forester was doing in that paragraph. So on the one hand, you, it's kind of like a pedagogy of Lacune, right? Right. Oh, that's brilliant. That's brilliant. We have more questions that are just piling up. I wanted to thank you for those. We have a quick comments on Twitter. Taylor Kendall wanted us to pay attention to two websites, marginalsyllab.us, which is a discussion about pedagogy that uses hypothesis very heavily and also crowd layers. Layers spelled L-A-A-E-R-S, which is Remy's awesome project that he co-created that gives you more tools for annotation. And then Nate Angel asked us to look at climatefeedback.org. This is what Jeremy mentioned earlier and that's the URL to examine. And while you're thinking of more comments and while you have more intense ideas, let me bring up another person who has a video question. And this is our splendid friend of the program, Roxanne Riskin. Hi, thank you for having me. Hi Jeremy, hi Amanda. My question relates to the video question. Now, for example, when you're embedding a YouTube into the hypothesis for people to look at and review, now consider a YouTube that has a text document to that. How can you bring this hypothetical? How can you bring that text document into the hypothesis so that can be annotated? That's a good question. I'm not sure I understood it though. You can embed YouTube videos in the marketing level within annotations, but if there's a text associated with the YouTube video, like what, like the comment section or some other? Right, if there's a transcript that follows the YouTube for example, if it's including closed captioning, there usually is a transcript and the courses that are fully accessible. Sure, so yeah, I mean, if there's an HTML version of the transcript, so if there's an HTML version of the transcript, you can annotate that. I think you may have said bring something into hypothesis. I mean, hypothesis is brought to bear on other platforms and other sources, so it could be taken, you can annotate YouTube comments at a YouTube site. You can't annotate within the video yet, grab a piece of text or grab a timestamp, whether there are other tools that do that and we aspire to do image and video annotation, but anytime there's an HTML transcript of or PDF transcript of something like a video, you can go and annotate it as a source of wherever that is. Very good. Okay, thank you. Really good practical question. We have a giant question coming up right now from a longtime friend and a deep thinker, Tom Hames from Texas, we'll bring him up right now, but let me just say we please feel free to bring up these giant questions or very, very detailed questions. We're glad to hear all of your thoughts and all of your feedback. So my question has to do with how we see the information that is in hypothesis and elsewhere. I mean, I tend to think of information as sets of connected ideas. And one of the things that I've been working on a lot lately is how text formats our ideas in certain linear fashions. And I think that some of the stuff that Vannevar Bush and Engelbart and others were really alluding to and Ted Nelson were really alluding to was this idea that that is no longer sufficient in terms of mastering the complexity of the ideas and issues that we have to deal with today. Annotation is a good step in that direction. And I think it's probably absolutely necessary to do that. But I'm wondering where the next step is. I'm wondering if there's a way of looking at the information because right now when you're looking at a hypothesis screen, you're seeing two linear streams that are interconnected but they're still linear streams. Whereas, you know, I've been doing a lot of work in my classes around with concept mapping and as a way of connecting things on more than one dimension. And I found it to be a very effective way because the human mind tends to think in those terms too. I mean, text is an artificial barrier to how we think. We don't think text, we have to translate into text and then we have to translate back out of text in to make it work within our minds. And which by the way, according to Leonard Schlein is actually sexist because apparently men do this better than women. But from a neurological perspective, women are more visual two dimensional thinkers in terms of how they perceive the world. And he connected that actually to the rise of literacy to the decline of matriarchal societies in thousands of years ago. It's an interesting argument. Interesting. But, you know, I'm very much interested in trying to figure out ways to look at complex problems both as a teacher, but also just as sort of as general how do we deal with problems like climate change? I mean, a climate change discussion is not Donald Trump is right, Donald Trump is wrong. Here's my response to Donald Trump. You know, as much as we want to annotate whitehouse.gov you know how that ping pong is going to end up going. You can see it on Twitter, right? So I'm getting to the question along about. The question I have is, are there plans within the platform to think about different ways of displaying the information that are less linear, that are more two dimensional? I mean, tagging does this a certain level, but how we look at these things, I think is going to be interesting going forward. That's a huge, huge stack of ideas, Tom. Let me rephrase it just to suggest that maybe we can tackle it more theoretically than practically. I mean, there is, we're not, we haven't yet designed the thing you're looking for, but I don't know if Amanda has anything to say just about the idea of trying to rethink our relationship to information and text and the pathways through them. And then I can say something too, so I do a lot of work with data visualization with distant reading, right? So I'm always thinking about the ways that we can see a text in a variety of ways. I have students do basic distant reading projects where we are looking at a variety of texts, extracting common terms, concordance work and looking at how those terms are used across a variety of texts. And I think that's basically what you're getting at here, right, is this idea of distant reading. And I think Hypothesis is definitely a good candidate for that kind of work. You can definitely extract metadata from Hypothesis and do data visualizations of that. People have, have already been doing that work. Maybe it would help if I could again, go kind of to a very practical assignment that I do in my class. So I have students do what I call a gallery walk. I teach a class about asylum seeking. We work with a nonprofit that helps facilitate resources for asylum seekers. So I have students bring in one article from the past six months on just the general concept of asylum seekers in America, in the United States. I then have a librarian come in and talk about left, center, and right publications. She shows kind of that map of where different publications fall. And then students have to find an article from the opposite point of view of the first article they brought in. Nice. We put those up around the physical walls of the classroom and the students go around and look for loaded rhetoric in the articles. And they write down what loaded rhetoric they found on the left, what ones they found in the center, and what ones they found on the right. And then they pull everywhere, send them into me and we create word clouds of what words they found in the left publications, the center publications, the right publications. And we look for shared language and we look for different language, right? This is a very basic way of getting at what you're talking about, right? It's just like looking at language in a different way. And so I guess what I'm saying is like, maybe one tool doesn't have to do it all. Maybe we can do these things in kind of like more basic ways that students are more familiar with, with like highlighting and going around the classroom, but then taking it to a level of that kind of like group crowdsourced information. That's an amazing, Amanda, have you, do you have photos of this process or any video? I'd love to see it. I mean, I do on my cell phone. Sure, I'd love to share it with you. But yeah, it's, you know, it's literally like articles taped on my classroom wall, but you could do it in a more digital way than that, although the pull everywhere piece is certainly using a digital tool. Do you find, you know, when you're thinking about this method of visualization, I mean, hypothesis is a text-centric tool in many ways. And you can see that from people in the humanities like myself who embrace it. Do we see web annotation evolving into a more trans-media format in say the next three years? And we've got Jeremy here, so I should put him on the spot. But you know, what do you think, how is this gonna, or is it gonna be a text apparatus like say texting? I mean, I think hypothesis has always had aspirations for to work with image annotation and video annotation. We've done early work there at our annual conference. I annotate, there's always folks working with the standard and other projects that are working more directly on image and video annotation. You know, maybe it's the English professor and me, but I think there's a lot of work to be done around, you know, building the kind of pathway, imagining Vannevar Bush's trail pathways through knowledge, just on the text, just on the hook of text and getting that right. So a lot of times, you know, even though I know image and video annotation are really cool and we may go there sooner rather than later, I think there's still a tremendous amount of work to be done in getting text annotation correct. Of course, video and images and multimedia can go into the annotations, but just really working with HTML and digitized text and how, you know, working across platforms, working across formats, there's still a tremendous amount of work to be done there, not just on the actual mechanics of doing that, but also what Tom was saying, which is the visualization of that. I think that is still an area of work to do, right? Like I can go to Amanda's public profile and hypothesis and start following what she's been annotating lately, maybe dive into some documents and jump around. And that works, but I'm not sure it works as well as Bush imagined it in really being able to see her pathway or follow her pathway. And so that there's work to be done on that sort of secondary sort of visualization space around how we see and moving in and out of text that have annotations on them. Well said. Tom, thank you for that great question. We have time for one last question and thank you, both of you, for such really, really great responses to this. We also have a question from Jacob Gawal. And Jacob, I keep massacring your name. My apologies, if it's Gawal or Gawal. But tell us about your piece. You just had an article about web annotation you wanted to share. Can you hear me? Yes. So it's not really about web annotation specifically, it does touch on web annotation, but it's about syllabi and the implicit metaphors that are sort of built into syllabi, especially the dominant metaphors, a syllabi being a contract. But there's a moment, a simulation marginal syllabus project and the way in which the marginal syllabus project frames syllabi metaphorically as a conversation space to have about course procedures and so on, which is very different from a contract. So that article is out this morning at Hybrid Pedagogy. Great. And also just to respond very briefly to the last topic of conversation around hypothesis, I think there's room for adapting Engelbart's idea of view control. I think that that's a way that hypothesis could grow in terms of having different ways of visualizing. I was just listening to that, imagining like a user, like a timeline of, and this already kind of exists, but something to do with, I've read this at this point and then this at this point and then this at this point. And here's sort of the view of the annotations in a sort of more zoomed out way. You cut out a little bit in describing what your article was about. It's about annotating syllabi themselves, correct? It includes a conversation about annotating syllabi, but largely it's about this metaphors that are implicit in syllabi and expanding our view of what those metaphors could be beyond the sort of contract metaphor that gets brought up repeatedly. I'm really looking forward to reading that because as I mentioned earlier, we just integrated hypothesis into our LMS, which is Blackboard, and my first assignment for all of my classes this term is to annotate my syllabus using hypothesis. Nice. I'm also hanging out in the hypothesis annotations of the article itself. Cool. And this is of course something that Remy has, I think every semester sort of tweets out people should annotate their syllabus. I think he's written about this and it's really unfortunate that we didn't get to have Remy here, but I'm glad that marginal syllabus got mentioned and I just wanted to add something else that kind of connects to both these questions, which is for people to check out crowdlayers.org, because crowdlayers is along the lines of what Jacob was just saying away and ties into what Amanda said earlier, a way to step back from the conversation and look at the sort of pathways and conversations that are happening in annotation and comments that are happening in annotation from a different perspective, through different lenses of time and space and networked relationships. Jeremy, are you familiar with Tags Explorer for Twitter? I think I checked it out before, but yeah. So when I have my students live tweet the reading of the novel, I use Tags Explorer to do exactly that, right? You can kind of trace their conversations, you can visualize them around clusters of tweets and topics, and it is a free to use open source tool. You just have to scrape the Twitter API, put it in, you're good. Well, that's a great suggestion, visualization. Listen, Jacob, thank you very much for a really good article, which we should all be reading soon. And then I hate to say this, but we have to wrap up our session. We are at the end of the hour and after all kinds of great discussion, we are out of time. Listen, Amanda and Jeremy, and Remy, if you can hear this, if you're been with us, is back. How can we follow your work? What are the best ways to keep up with you? If you have follow-up questions for me, Twitter is always a good idea. I'm just at Amanda LaCastro on Twitter. My website, which is digitocentrism.com, has all of my other relevant contact information as well. And I will be giving a keynote at this year's NCTE, the National Council for Teachers of English, in November here in Baltimore, so. Mm-hmm, excellent. And Jeremy? That's awesome, I didn't know that, Amanda. That's all the more reason to go. Yeah, a doctor, what am I, at Twitter, Dr. Underscore, Jaydeen, at Twitter for follow-up questions. Hypothesis slash education. Also education at hypothesis. So, yeah, reach out. Happy to keep the conversation going. And Remy has a book at MIT Press Pub Pub. I don't know if somebody can tweet it or share it in the chat here, but he has a book with entero. And I think it's open for annotation on the Pub Pub platform. And so if you are, if you haven't had your fill about annotation right now, you can go read the seven chapters there and you can annotate. And he just shared this on Twitter, so you can all find that there. Jeremy, Remy, and Amanda, thank you so much for really, really a deep dive into this great technology. Thank you for your work too. You both are just creative geniuses, thank you. Thanks, Brian, thanks, Amanda. And don't go yet, because we have to tell you what's happening next and what's on next. But again, let me thank everybody for terrific questions, because that was really, really rich. You came with us from a wide range of topics. Thank you. Now next week, we're going to zoom into the LMS. We're very privileged to have the CEO of Instructure, the company that makes Canvas. So Dan Goldsmith is gonna be talking with us about where the LMS can be going. So please join us with your thoughts and questions. We'd also like to make sure that you get a whack at the survey. So make sure you get to look at the tinyurl.com slash forum survey 2019. If you're on our email list, you've already gotten that in your email. And if you haven't or if you have any issues with it, just quickly shoot me a note. Now, if you'd like to keep talking about annotation or the LMS or anything about the future of education and technology, we have all these places on social media for you to explore. So please head to Twitter, Slack, LinkedIn or Facebook. We'd be glad to talk with you. In the meantime, thank you all for a really great conversation. We really appreciate it. I'm gonna try something now starting a new tradition here. I'll stick around here for about five minutes if you guys would like to talk, but more important if you'd like to talk with each other. So please take some time and chat and I'll be here. And otherwise, we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.