One of my go-to applications for both personal and collaborative annotation is “Hypothes.is”. Hypothesis is a Learning Management System most popularly used through its browser extension that allows you to annotate web pages i.e. anything between New Yorker articles and Project Gutenberg book pages. You can make an account for private annotations or create groups for collaborative work on a webpage. I have most often used it to annotate poems on the Poetry Foundation website since much of my research and creative work involves poems. Along with my academic work, I also assign my students to annotate texts together using Hypothesis which often allows them to engage with each other’s thought processes. The best part about Hypothesis is that many people make their annotations public meaning that you might open a link to a Walt Whitman poem and see what both high school and graduate students have to say about the text. The company itself is big on open access, as it writes on its website: “Our mission is to enable conversations over the world’s knowledge.”
Hypothesis is an “open source” platform so they take the word “collaboration” pretty seriously. Upon doing some research, I discovered that Dan Whaley, the founder of Hypothesis, developed this software to allow climate scientists to have conversations on climate research through web annotations on ClimateFeedback.com. As someone who had only used Hypothesis in an educational context, it was interesting to see the political kairos of the application since for the longest time, I assumed that it was created out of an academic necessity. More importantly, its functional methodology is not the only collaborative aspect of Hypothesis. They also invite developers to contribute to technical conversations on GitHub, Slack [which I joined and was surprised at how it had less than 100 members], and a mailing list thread. While this deeply collaborative nature made me comfortable in my use of the application, I grew skeptical of the long-term promise of “accessibility” as I saw that Hypothesis is funded by ITHAKA, the same organization that funds JSTOR.
The most exciting part is that Hypothesis is quite open about the materiality of its processes too. An article posted on their website titled “Beyond Borders: Why We’re Now Also Hosting Data in Canada” (2022) mentions, albeit critically unaware of the very environmental effects the application was born to discuss, the importance of privacy in data centers:
“Having all social annotation data housed within their borders helps Canadian schools comply with national, regional, and institutional data storage policies. Hypothesis will work the way it always has for Canadian users but, behind the scenes, all their data can now sit within Amazon Web Services data centers located in Canada.”
While the point here seems more of legality than privacy, I appreciate the very use of the term “data center” now that I am aware of its infrastructural role. Of course, I am reminded of the very modular nature of the supply chain, and how the seemingly ethical and accessible company relies on the notorious “Amazon” for the physical space it fosters. The truth also is that Hypothesis’ access is restricted to the “knowledge” of those with access to the internet.
Finally, I think it is this realization, as Miriam Posner discusses, of the inevitable reliability of supply chain elements on alienated unknown nodes that makes me feel okay with my use of the Hypothesis. I have used other close-knit and personalizable annotation technologies, like Doccano, which needs to be hosted on platforms like Heroku but it involves the labor of manually creating user profiles for each student, even if it comes with the perks of being in charge of the HTML code of the annotations and being able to export them in the ways I wish. For large-scale use, however, and for the pleasure of global connectivity with annotators, I think Hypothesis is here to stay in my work.
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