Annotations are an easy way to Show Your Work

Journalists are increasingly being asked to show their work. Politifact does that with a sources box, like this:

This is great! The more citation of sources, the better. If I want to check those sources, though, I often wind up spending a lot of time searching within source articles to find passages cited implicitly but not explicitly. If those passages are marked using annotations, the method I’ll describe here makes that material available explicitly, in ways that streamline the reporter’s workflow and improve the reader’s experience.

In A Hypothesis-powered Toolkit for Fact Checkers I described a toolkit that supported the original incarnation of the Digital Polarization Project. More recently I’ve unbundled the key ingredients of that toolkit and made them separately available for reuse. The ingredient I’ll discuss here, HypothesisFootnotes, is illustrated in this short clip from a 10-minute screencast about the original toolkit. Here’s the upshot: Given a web page that contains Hypothesis direct links, you can include a script that pulls the cited material into the page, and connects direct links in the page to citations gathered elsewhere in the page.

Why would such links exist in the first place? Well, if you’re a reporter working on an investigation, you’re likely to be gathering evidence from a variety of sources on the web. And you’re probably copying and pasting bits and pieces of those sources into some kind of notebook. If you annotate passages within those sources, you’ve captured them in a way that streamlines your own personal (or team) management of that information. That’s the primary benefit. You’re creating a virtual notebook that makes that material available not only to you, but to your team. Secondarily, it’s available to readers of your work, and to anyone else who can make good use of the material you’ve gathered.

The example here brings an additional benefit, building on another demonstration in which I showed how to improve Wikipedia citations with direct links. There I showed that a Wikipedia citation need not only point to the top of a source web page. If the citation refers specifically to a passage within the source page, it can use a direct link to refer the reader directly to that passage.

Here’s an example that’s currently live in Wikipedia:

It looks like any other source link in Wikipedia. But here’s where it takes you in the cited Press Democrat story:

Not every source link warrants this treatment. When a citation refers to a specific context in a source, though, it’s really helpful to send the reader directly to that context. It can be time-consuming to follow a set of direct links to see cited passages in context. Why not collapse them into the article from which they are cited? That’s what HypothesisFootnotes does. The scattered contexts defined by a set of Hypothesis direct links are assembled into a package of footnotes within the article. Readers can still visit those contexts, of course, but since time is short and attention is scarce, it’s helpful to collapse them into an included summary.

This technique will work in any content management system. If you have a page that cites sources using direct links, you can use the HyothesisFootnotes script to bring the targets of those direct links into the page.