Hypothes.is

As more historical work finds a home in digital spaces and as many history classes assign digital alternatives to traditional papers, tools that allow commenting on digital media are becoming increasingly valuable. Hypothes.is—designed as a platform to make the internet annotatable—is one of the most recent iterations of this kind of tool. The mission of the nonprofit organization behind the tool—also called Hypothes.is—is “to enable a conversation over the world's knowledge.” Hypothes.is allows public, sentence-level annotation of the internet in service of open critique and collaborative note taking and allows annotation in private groups to facilitate conversation for more limited audiences. Hypothes.is has a fairly low barrier to entry. User accounts are required but are free and can be pseudonymous. The program can be installed as a Chrome browser plugin, but users can also visit http://Hypothes.is and paste in the url of the page they want to annotate. Once the tool is launched, a sidebar allows users to highlight text, add annotations, read annotations that others have left on the same page, create private groups, and share the annotated page. While these functions have broad implications for public engagement, the features of Hypothes.is are also proving useful in history classrooms. For example, students in public history classes might use it to offer feedback on specific aspects of a digital archive. Faculty might use the private group feature to provide feedback on students' digital projects. Hypothes.is might alternately facilitate beta testing and peer review before those projects go “live

Annotation · Conversation · Multimedia · Plug-in · Sentence · Service (business · Sociology · The Internet · World Wide Web · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Wikis in Education and Collaboration