Web Annotations as Perspectives
Yesterday Mike Caulfield posted a thoughtful piece on annotating the web, Beyond Conversation, on ways in which the web without annotation does not live up to the expectations we ought to have for a system of personal and collective memory. The current web has a bias towards authors over readers and towards producing a single (occasionally collaborative) presentation and path through a set of content. In a follow-up, Mike tightens his focus in wanting readers’ paths and links to have more primacy on the web, to suggest an intermediate role between author and reader of a contributing connector:
The chances that any given reader knows more about that subject than the person who just wrote it are slim. … On the other hand, the chances that any given reader knows something related to that subject are very high.
We all have this experience when inspired by reading, to connect it with other knowledge we already have. In this On Being interview with Brainpickings’ Maria Popova, the idea of sharing one’s own path and commentary as you rediscover the world’s knowledge is central, and one aspect of the conversation is the marginalia found in books, especially those read and contextualised by later influential minds; as in As We May Think, there is value in being able to retrace the patterns and connections of learning left by others.
We are still developing ways to support saving this often-ephemeral internal commentary onto the web. At one end we do have rich latent history of paths and reading patterns in our browsing history - I often rely on my Firefox Sync history to allow me to return to previous thoughts and connections, but no capacity to publish or share that record. (And federated wiki encodes some contextual pathmaking into its URLs.) At the other end, blogs can make explicit thoughts and connections and clearly provide concrete records of developing thought - but also take significantly more resources and often has a finality of publishing that is different from marginalia. And social sharing today seems intentionally dis-associating, especially as links are de-emphasized. I’m hopeful that current annotation projects like Hypothesis and Federated Wiki will create a middle approach that is connected and contextual.
Ian Bicking is working on an annotation-related project at Mozilla, and a few months back posted a philosophical piece on how collecting and sharing your thoughts - entering into dialog as we read, with the text and with other readers, is how we construct knowledge and meaning:
I see dialog as supportive of personal growth, not of collective wisdom - our collective wisdom will increase as we individually grow.
Annotation in all these views is an individual activity (in conversation) with all the variety of perspectives and paths that a diversity of people and times can produce. It is primarily about enriching the process of learning; not directly aiming for global fact-checking or consensus-building but for expanding the range and diversity of connections between ideas that we encounter.