Thank you, Nate, for so much work here:
-cat-herding the Twitter discussion
-writing up this post
-making sure we could use Hypothesis to discuss it, appropriately.
Thanks, too, to the Hypothetical participants for doing so: Laura, Gardner, Roland, Shakira.

I’ve been thinking of this since the Twitter discussion.
I think we’re still in early days. I rarely hear people discuss annotation in the wild.
Further, there’s little competition. When we refer to annotation it means Hypothesis.
So we struggle with being ahead of the curve.

Annotation may seem humanities-centric, which can limit its growth as we keep embracing the idiotic Two Cultures divide. Not to mention the problem of the humanities losing students and support both within and beyond the academy.

Additionally, Laura is quite right to point out how stressful the time question is. Students generally work and/or balance other responsibilities, and feel enormously pressured by the economic pressures around affording college. Faculty – well, by “faculty” we should begin by assuming they are adjuncts, and hence not only have to manage a complex schedule, but do so without institutional support. In turn those support staff, part of the dreaded “administrative bloat,” also suffer from addressing an ever-imbricating stack of services and responsibilities.

I’ve also been wondering about the role of text, since annotation is nearly entirely a textual affair. So much attention now focuses on media – well, video in particular – while we also dive deeply into data, which we think of as numerical in nature, that perhaps the long-heralded turn away from text is occurring.

I’ll keep ruminating.