Tech tutorials and documentation are a particularly exciting place for inline annotation, since users can indicate exactly where they got stuck or need additional information. Using the #DHannotates hashtag, we're encouraging digital humanists to annotate tutorials, documentation, and other DHy webpages as an easy way of improving these resources for the whole community. Hypothesis annotation makes inline annotation easy! Simply

  1. Create a Hypothesis account
  2. Prefix the URL of the webpage you want to annotate with https://via.hypothes.is/ (that is, cut and paste that in front of the link to the page you want to annotate!)
  3. Annotation feels very intuitive: highlight the text you want to talk about using your mouse cursor, and then type in your comment or question. See this tutorial for specific steps and pictures that show you everything you can do with annotation.

If you've wanted to try out a tech skill like visualization or Python before, but weren't sure how to start—or started a tutorial and got stuck—read on! (If you'd like to use this in the classroom, see Shawn Graham's post "Can we fix it? Yes we can! #DHAnnotates Feb 8-12" on the Electric Archaeology site.)

Work through a tutorial now (and get help if you encounter a problem!)

From now through the end of next week (February 2-12), Shawn Graham and I (and anyone else who wants to volunteer!) will address any Hypothesis annotations created on a particular DH resource: the Programming Historian tutorials (resources for learning various DH tech skills, written to be friendly to humanists new to coding and other tech work). We'll answer questions when possible, and when we can't, we'll create an issue in the Programming Historian GitHub repo to make sure someone knows about it (we'll also try to find people who can answer questions via Twitter and the Digital Humanities Slack).

Interesting lessons include:

Questions during a tutorial? Ideas for improvements? Get stuck? Want to thank the tutorial's writers and editors? You can use Hypothesis annotation to add your thoughts.

If a DHer annotates, does anyone hear?

During Feb 2-12, Shawn Graham and I will respond to Programming Historian annotations and/or add an issue to the site's GitHub repo so that the annotation is heard and attended to (note, of course, that Programming Historian is written and run by generous volunteers, so help is dependent on volunteers' time... but this is a step toward making sure questions and ideas are seen).

For beyond next week (2/2-2/12), we're discussing automating the process of turning Hypothesis annotations into GitHub issues here: https://github.com/programminghistorian/jekyll/issues/182. Please do join the conversation!