This past week I was able to attend three different workshops for NYCDH Week, introducing me to three very different tools and platforms: Hypothesis, Manifold, and Palladio. This was my first time taking part in the event. Even considering Zoom fatigue, I loved that these workshops happened via video as it meant I could attend many more sessions than I think I could have if they were in person at locations all across the city.
Hypothesis
The Introduction to Hypothesis Web Annotation workshop was led by Alex Gil (@elotroalex), the digital scholarship librarian at Columbia University Libraries. Hypothesis is a tool that allows annotation of any webpage. You can annotate publicly (for anyone who has Hypothesis to view), or you can create private groups so only members of the group see the annotations. It is free to use and built with open-source technology. All of your annotations are saved to their cloud. There is a paid version where they will work with your institution so the information is saved to your own servers, but this workshop focused on the free version. As it is open-source, you could also build your own site and integrate the Hypothesis code directly into it.
Hypothesis adds a layer to the webpage you want to annotate; it does not alter the content on the webpages. You can access it via browser extension, or you can add “via.hypothes.is/” before the URL of the page you want to annotate. Their development team is working toward enabling annotation of images, but at the moment Hypothesis annotates text. They do have an Optical Character Recognition workflow so you can turn images of text (e.g., scanned PDFs) into readable/annotatable text.
The Hypothesis interface is relatively intuitive (see their tutorial on Annotation Basics), and it’s very fun to use. We’re using this tool for another one of my classes this semester, and I’ve found it to be a very useful way of having conversations about the readings outside of the dedicated class time (especially in this time of virtual learning). You can also add images, gifs, and videos in your annotations. And you can add tags to your annotations as a way to keep your notes organized. For instance if you were annotating with a class, you could agree to use “question” as tag to alert the professor you have a question to ask them. As you create an account with an email address, when someone responds directly to your annotation you get an email notification.
You can be in many groups, but it is very easy to accidentally post your annotations to the wrong group. Unfortunately there is no way to move your annotations from one group to another; the only fix is to redo it. The other caveat is that if the webpage you’re annotating is taken down, all of your annotations will be lost along with it. There is a way to download your citations if you want to back them up, but this will only represent your notes as they existed when you downloaded them. There is also the ability to share your annotations, or a specific annotation, directly to other sites (such as Twitter).
Alex suggested this tool could be used for web-based DH project development for the team to collectively comment on functionality and content, which I thought might be beneficial to some of our project-building this semester. Here is an example of a team who used Hypothesis in the creation of their DH project: The Caribbean Digital & Peer Review: A Musical Passage Hypothesis. Alex has also successfully used the tool in a virtual conference, as an alternative to synchronous video conferencing.
Manifold
The Introduction to Manifold Scholarship was led by Robin Miller (@robin_r_miller), an open educational technologist and librarian at The CUNY Graduate Center (GC), and Wendy Barrales (@WendyBarrales), a Manifold graduate fellow at the GC. Manifold is a completely open-source publishing platform. The platform was created by the University of Minnesota Press and the GC. Anyone can download the code for free and create their own “instance” of Manifold. The CUNY instance of Manifold promotes open educational resources, with all texts being openly licensed or made available by the creators. It is free for anyone in the CUNY community to publish on Manifold, and the publication of student work is encouraged.
The platform allows for the publication of dynamic texts, with the ability to embed multimedia resources. It also has a built-in Hypothesis-like annotation tool which allows you to create public and private reading groups. When creating a new project, Manifold offers very customizable layouts. You can include resource pages and tools, as well as pull in social media feeds based on hashtags. The platform has dynamic screen sizing and is optimized for mobile use. The publication page you create is crawled by search engines, so you can optimize your content for this. You can enable epub options so that content is easily downloaded, improving access for people with limited internet connectivity.
Manifold is a publishing platform only, not an authoring one. You create your project by “ingesting” (uploading) the text such as an EPUB from Project Gutenberg, Google doc, Word docx, Markup, or HTML. Manifold speaks HTML, so you may have to tinker with non-HTML texts to preserve your desired formatting. If you have to make any changes to the text, you have to make them in your file and re-ingest. If you re-ingest the same file, Manifold will recognize the changes and implement them quickly. If you need to make changes after your text has been annotated by readers, any annotations associated with the previous version may be lost, depending on how extensive the changes are.
Here are some additional links about Getting Started with Manifold and the CUNY Manifold Maker Guide.
Palladio
The Mapping with Palladio workshop was led by Caterina Agostini (@CateAgostini), a PhD candidate at Rutgers University. Palladio is a free mapping tool created by humanities scholars at Stanford. It’s best application is in mapping correspondence and points of arrival and departure and tracking connections.
After uploading your data, you can visualize it through a map, as well as through graphs, tables, and galleries (if you have images associated with the data points). This tool only allows you to create visualizations; there is no way to save your visualizations, except through screenshots. If you exit the application, you will lose all of your visualizations. The data upload is a bit buggy. For instance, when uploading data with special characters (e.g., in names), there is some manual work that needs to be done for the program to recognize it. The tool is also limited in that you cannot indicate directionality in your connecting lines (e.g., the “from” to the “to” in correspondence or the “departure” to the “arrival” in travel).
Here is a write-up from Miriam Posner on Getting Started with Palladio, in which she specifies how to decide if the tool could be right for your visualization goals. Caterina also shared Mapping_with_Palladio_Handout (1) outlining the steps of our workshop.
At one point during the workshop, we were discussing the different layers you can pick for the base map. You can upload your own custom layer as long as it is geocoded. She mentioned however that there are scholars who argue that it isn’t ethical to use historical maps in digital projects as this was never part of their intended use. She didn’t expand much beyond that, nor did she share her own opinion, more just that this is a concern that some people have raised. Has anyone else come across this? I’ve reached out to her for more information; I will let you know when I hear back from her.
