Designing a guide to practise collective annotation
In 2021 and 2022, the Organoesis collective and the Association des amis de la génération Thunberg, heir to Ars Industrialis, ran contributive reading groups on the work of Bernard Stiegler, starting with La Société automatique, tome 1. L'avenir du travail (Fayard, 2015).
These groups worked with Hypothesis, a free tool for annotating an online document as one would write in the margins of a book, except that these margins are shared. Each member can highlight a passage, attach a comment or reply to someone else's, and these annotations remain visible to everyone who later reads the text.
With Victor Chaix, we wrote a practice guide that walks step by step through installing the tool and then using it together, with shared categories to organise the annotations. It supported guided annotation workshops, so that people learnt both by reading and by doing.
