Social Annotation, Contextual Collaboration and Online Transparency:
    A history of the past and future of social annotation in printed books and on the web

Mira Dontcheva   Bobby Fishkin, Reframe It

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University January 30, 2009

We will look at the ways in which annotation practices and technologies that enable discussion and contextual textual transparency have evolved from printed books to online interfaces from blogs to Third Voice/Stickies to Comment Press to Reframe It. We will look at how certain interface innovations can allow time shifting in the interpretation of scholarly texts and online content and how these same interface innovations have a long history among great thinkers and ordinary readers who have placed texts of centrality into their social context through contextual use of marginalia.  .

bart

Bobby Fishkin is CEO and Co-Founder of Reframe It Inc- a company that allows users to comment in the margin of any web page without the permission of the site. Bobby came up with the idea for Reframe It while working on an academic project looking at marginalia in Shakespeare's work. Bobby has been a Special Advisor to Tomorrow's Europe, a project of the European Commission, & Special Advisor to the Center For Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University. He worked as a social entrepreneur and Fellow of the Richard Florida Creativity Group and Fellow of the Office of the Mayor of Baltimore, USA. He conceived and developed ACCESS Baltimore Arts Creating Community Energy and Social Solutions, a program which creates opportunities for at-risk youth and the mentors who work with them to attend cultural events together. He also conceived and developed the Books for Teachers program, which has created hundreds of classroom libraries in the state of Connecticut. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale College with a B.A. in Philosophy, Bobby is also a playwright who has been produced in London and New York. A documentary about the making of one of his plays is available at: Richard III..

View this talk on line at CS547 on Stanford OnLine or using this video link.

Titles and abstracts for previous years are available by year and by speaker.