Roads of Annotation

Light streets at night in Taipei, Taiwan public domain image from GoodFreePhotos shared under a Creative Commons CC0 license.

As you are reading Augmenting Human Intellect pay attention to phrases, sentences that catch your attention. Sometimes we call them “nuggets.”

Respond to the nugget in your annotation. We don’t want to prescribe how or what to annotate on this project–so what follows are just a few suggestions to get you started:

  • Ask a question.
  • Make an observation.
  • Offer additional information.
  • Define a word for your fellow readers.
  • Note a connection with other parts of the document, or with your world, or with the world in general, then or now.
  • If you have a URL for that connection, provide a link.
  • If you were fortunate enough to be one of Engelbart’s colleagues, contribute some of that close insight.

Expert and novice annotations are valuable in this project. Don’t feel you have to know everything before you can say anything. Sometimes novices notice things that are less visible to experts. With that in mind, these “Hypothesis Community Guidelines” are important pointers for creating and sustaining collegial, productive online communities, the kind of community we want to foster here.

We also recommend the Hypothes.is Annotation Tips for Students with useful suggestions (and examples) under headings “Select text carefully for annotation,” “Annotations should be additive,” “Make use of the toolbar,” “Use links and images,” and “Use tags.”

“Use tags” is of particular interest for this project. We have grand hopes of participants being “voracious” taggers of their annotations. Tags in annotations make visible various communities of thinkers and annotators via a simple web address.

In particular, we think it will be valuable to view annotations based on participants’ relationship to Doug Engelbart, e.g.

  • SRI (colleagues from the Stanford Research Institute)
  • ARC (colleagues from the Augmentation Research Center)
  • NIC (colleagues from the Network Information Center)
  • PARC (staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center)
  • DEI (Doug Engelbart Institute)
  • scholar
  • student

Multiple tags can be used to indicate multiple relationships, as will often be the case. Topical or thematic tags are welcome, such as collectiveintelligence, structuring, framework, symbols toolsIf you want to use a “knowledge emotion” tag, go for it!

In short, please tag frequently. Tags help to indicate the “thought vectors” moving through a “concept space,” to use Engelbart’s memorable phrase describing collective intelligence in action.

Adding tags to annotation creates potential connective nodes.

Once we have some tagging in play, those tags above become links to find annotations on the Augmenting Human Intellect paper.

  • SRI (colleagues from the Stanford Research Institute)
  • ARC (colleagues from the Augmentation Research Center)
  • NIC (colleagues from the Network Information Center)
  • PARC (staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center)
  • DEI (Doug Engelbart Institute)
  • scholar
  • student

And tags are one other way we can explore the collective annotation activity across this project– see the Annotation Dashboard for more details.

Finally, you can share annotations directly from the hypothes.is tool:

If you are on twitter, use the share options to tweet out yours (or any other person’s annotations. In your tweets, please include the #augmentintellect hashtag- it will feed a visualization of tweeted activity.

Now you should be ready to begin the Week[1] annotation activities.

One comment

  1. Pingback: 1-2-3 Annotating the Intent – CogDogBlog

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