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Hypothes.is

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Hypothesis
FoundedJuly 1, 2011 (2011-07-01) (as the Hypothes.is Project)
FounderDan Whaley
TypePublic benefit corporation
LocationSan Francisco, California
Key people
Joe Ferraro (CEO)
Websitehypothes.is

Hypothesis, originally styled Hypothes.is, is an open-source social annotation platform that allows users to highlight and annotate web pages, PDF files and other digital content. It is operated by Annotation Unlimited, PBC, a public benefit corporation incorporated in 2019.[1][2][3]

The platform is used in higher education, where it works inside learning management systems.[2]

History

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Originally launched in 2011 as the non-profit Hypothes.is Project, Hypothesis was founded by Dan Whaley, co-founder of GetThere.[1][4][5] As described in 2011, the project aimed to collect comments about statements made in any web-accessible content, and to filter and rank those comments through a reputation system to assess each statement's credibility.[6][7][8] It was summarized at the time as "a peer review layer for the entire Internet."[9][10] Its advisors included John Perry Barlow, Charles Bazerman, Philip Bourne and Brewster Kahle.[6]

A Kickstarter drive to raise $100,000 to fund a working prototype narrowly reached its goal on November 13, 2011.[10][11] The effort was organized as a non-profit.[12][13] The non-profit received financial support from the Shuttleworth Foundation,[14] the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,[15] the Helmsley Trust,[16] the Knight Foundation[17] and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.[18]

Whaley introduced the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Annotation Working Group at the consortium's technical plenary in 2014.[19] In December 2015, the Hypothes.is Project was a founding member of a coalition of scholarly publishers, platforms, libraries, and technology organizations to create an open, interoperable annotation layer over their content.[20] The W3C working group published three Recommendations in February 2017, setting out a standard data model, vocabulary and protocol for web annotation.[21] Elsevier began letting readers annotate its journal articles with their Elsevier logins in 2018, after comparable arrangements with MIT Press, the American Geophysical Union, eLife and bioRxiv.[22]

Annotation Unlimited, PBC, a company incorporated in Delaware in March 2019,[3] took over development of the software from the non-profit.[23][1] By May 2019, more than five million annotations had been posted with the software.[24] In August 2022, after noting that being a non-profit limited the project to grants and donations and with several of the key funding sources the Hypothes.is Project relied on no longer available, the company publicly introduced itself as Anno.[23][1] Anno is a public benefit corporation, a form that allows it to take outside investment. It raised a $14 million seed round, including $2.5 million from ITHAKA, the provider of JSTOR.[25][26] The Hypothes.is Project continues separately as a non-profit working on advocacy and open annotation standards.[26] In June 2024, Joe Ferraro succeeded Whaley as chief executive of the company.[27]

Operations

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Hypothesis works as a layer of commentary over pages published by other people. Because comments are kept on the service's own servers and shown over the page rather than written into it, content can be annotated without involving whoever published it. It can be used through a browser extension or through a link that routes a page via the service, and publishers can embed the software on their own sites.[28]

Comments can be public, shared with a group, or visible only to their author.[2] Public ones are placed in the public domain under the CC0 dedication, while private and group comments remain the property of their author.[29] The browser extension is free to use, and colleges and universities pay a fee to run the service inside their learning management systems.[2]

Use in education

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In teaching, the practice is known as social annotation: a class marks up the same assigned text, and students reply to one another in the margins.[2] An application for learning management systems places annotation assignments inside the course site. Institutions have deployed it in Canvas,[30] Blackboard Learn,[31] D2L Brightspace[32] and Moodle.[33] Undergraduate use grew after teaching moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic, and results depend on how clearly instructors frame the task.[2]

Research

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Studies have examined how Hypothesis and similar tools are used in teaching. A 2022 case study in F1000Research examined how undergraduates in three courses used Hypothesis to build knowledge together. It found that students most often used annotations to interpret and elaborate on the readings, and that replies between students were relatively uncommon.[34] A study published the same year in Technology, Mind, and Behavior examined technologies for peer interaction during the shift to remote teaching in the COVID-19 pandemic, including social annotation tools such as Hypothesis. It found that the use of such technologies was associated with better student performance and a greater sense of belonging.[35] A comparison in Frontiers in Education, also from 2022, found similar annotation quality on Hypothesis and Perusall, and most students in that study preferred annotation-based assessment to a conventional template-based assignment.[36]

Digital library research has examined how Hypothes.is annotations become detached from their text when web pages change.[37] Nature surveyed attempts to build an annotation layer over the research literature in 2015 and discussed Hypothes.is among them.[20]

See also

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References

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  1. 1 2 3 4 Peet, Lisa (September 8, 2022). "ITHAKA Invests in Open Access Annotation Service Hypothesis". Library Journal.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 D'Agostino, Susan (October 12, 2022). "With Online Social Annotation, Students Read Together". Inside Higher Ed.
  3. 1 2 "Entity Details: Annotation Unlimited, PBC (File Number 7331947)". Division of Corporations – Entity Search. Delaware Department of State.
  4. ↑ Schonfeld, Erick (Oct 31, 2011), Hypothes.is: A Kickstarter Project To Peer Review The Web, Techcrunch, retrieved 2011-11-14
  5. ↑ Fernandes, Lorna (Oct 26, 1997). "It's no small world for ITN". San Jose Business Journal. American City Business Journals. Retrieved 2011-11-14.
  6. 1 2 Dan Whaley (ed.). "The Internet, peer-reviewed". Hypothes.is. Archived from the original on November 15, 2011. Retrieved 2011-11-14.
  7. ↑ Masnick, Mike (Oct 24, 2011). "Interesting Ideas: Can You Peer Review The Entire Internet, Sentence By Sentence". Techdirt. Retrieved 2011-11-14.
  8. ↑ Shaughnessy, Haydn (Oct 21, 2011). "Would Your Blog Stand up To Criticism? Here Comes Peer Review". Forbes. Retrieved 2011-11-14.
  9. ↑ Kirkpatrick, Marshall (Oct 20, 2011). "Hypothes.is: A Peer-Review Layer for the Whole Internet". ReadWriteWeb. Archived from the original on November 7, 2011. Retrieved 2011-11-14.
  10. 1 2 Farley, Tim (17 November 2011). "Hypothes.is Reaches Funding Goal". James Randi Educational Foundation. Retrieved 2011-11-26.
  11. ↑ Hypothes.is - Taking peer review to the Internet. on Kickstarter
  12. ↑ David Streitfeld (April 11, 2013). "Speak Up, the Internet Can't Hear You". New York Times. Retrieved 2013-05-02.
  13. ↑ "Letter 947 (DO/CG)" (PDF). IRS. June 29, 2013. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 7, 2013.
  14. ↑ "Active Fellows: Dan Whaley". The Shuttleworth Foundation Trust. Retrieved 2013-05-02.
  15. ↑ "2011 Annual Report" (PDF). Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. p. 72. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-01-15. Retrieved 2013-07-23.
  16. ↑ "Helmsley Trust Supports Open Annotation in Biomedical Research | Hypothesis". hypothes.is. 11 January 2015. Retrieved 2015-10-28.
  17. ↑ "A Grant from the Knight Foundation | Hypothesis". hypothes.is. 4 October 2013. Retrieved 2015-10-28.
  18. ↑ "Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation". June 9, 2014. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  19. ↑ "Web Annotation Working Group". World Wide Web Consortium.
  20. 1 2 Perkel, Jeffrey M. (December 1, 2015). "Annotating the scholarly web". Nature. 528 (7580): 153–154. Bibcode:2015Natur.528..153P. doi:10.1038/528153a. PMID 26632591. doi:10.1038/528153a
  21. ↑ "Three recommendations to enable Annotations on the Web". World Wide Web Consortium. February 23, 2017.
  22. ↑ Young, Jeffrey R. (February 28, 2018). "How a Partnership Over Annotation Software Fits Into Bigger Changes in Research Workflow". EdSurge.
  23. 1 2 "Say Hello to Anno". 18 August 2022.
  24. ↑ Shaikh-Lesko, Rina (May 6, 2019). "Web annotation tool Hypothesis hits a milestone". Nature. 569 (7755): 295. doi:10.1038/d41586-019-01427-9.
  25. ↑ "ITHAKA invests in open-annotation leader Hypothesis". ITHAKA. August 18, 2022.
  26. 1 2 "Ithaka Announces $2.5 Million Investment to Open Annotation Provider Hypothesis". infoDOCKET. Library Journal. August 18, 2022.
  27. ↑ "Social annotation company Hypothesis announces new CEO". Sociable. June 19, 2024.
  28. ↑ Perton, Marc (April 30, 2016). "With Web Annotation, You Can Comment on Any Page—But Should You?". Newsweek.
  29. ↑ "What is the license on annotations?". Hypothesis.
  30. ↑ "Hypothes.is Social Annotation". Dartmouth College.
  31. ↑ "Hypothesis for Blackboard: Instructions for Faculty" (PDF). Montgomery College.
  32. ↑ "Hypothes.is (D2L Brightspace)". University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
  33. ↑ "Moodle: Hypothesis". Reed College.
  34. ↑ Morales, Esteban; Kalir, Jeremiah H.; Fleerackers, Alice; Alperin, Juan Pablo (2022). "Using social annotation to construct knowledge with others: A case study across undergraduate courses". F1000Research. 11: 235. doi:10.12688/f1000research.109525.2. PMC 8938630. PMID 35388338.
  35. ↑ Motz, Benjamin A.; Quick, Joshua D.; Morrone, Anastasia S. (2022). "When online courses became the student union: Technologies for peer interaction and their association with improved outcomes during COVID-19". Technology, Mind, and Behavior. 3 (1): 181–193. doi:10.1037/tmb0000061.
  36. ↑ Porter, Gavin W. (May 10, 2022). "Collaborative Online Annotation: Pedagogy, Assessment and Platform Comparisons". Frontiers in Education. 7. doi:10.3389/feduc.2022.852849.
  37. ↑ Aturban, Mohamed; Nelson, Michael L.; Weigle, Michele C. (2015). "Quantifying Orphaned Annotations in Hypothes.is". Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer. pp. 15–27. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-24592-8_2.
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