(2017-06-27) Udell Thoughts On Audrey Watters Thoughts On Annotation

Jon Udell: Thoughts on Audrey Watters’ “Thoughts on Annotation”. Hypothesis can unify a set of annotations across a family of representations of the “same” work.

So you might issue three different API queries — to Hypothesis, to a Hypothesis-based service, and to a non-Hypothesis-based service — for a PDF fingerprint or a DOI. Each of those services might or might not internally unify annotations across a family of “same” resources. If you were to then merge the results of those three queries, you’d be an annotation aggregator — the moral equivalent of what Radio UserLand, Technorati, and other blog aggregators did in the early blogosphere.

I’m much less committed to having one canonical “place” for annotations than Hypothesis is.