Josh Peek edited Linking People.md  over 9 years ago

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There is now a push, both in industry ventures and in open standards, to allow for the annotation of digital objects across the internet. The World Wide Web Consortium, responsible for developing web standards, has a working group on open standards, with a nice visualization of their ideas [here](http://www.w3.org/annotation/diagrams/annotation-architecture.svg). These standards are designed to support annotation engines within them, such as [hypothes.is](http://hypothes.is). There are also companies working on annotation specific to scholarly publications, such as [Domeo](http://www.annotationframework.org) and a [vibrant community](http://iannotate.org) working on these problems. Technology already exists for referencing smaller parts of papers through [component DOIs](http://blog.martinfenner.org/2014/08/02/fragment-identifiers-and-dois/) and, given the success of the DOI paradigm, this may be a ripe area for exploration of annotations for journals.  It is worth noting that the idea of annotation as a powerful communication tool is not limited obscure standards working groups and scholarly startups. Amusingly, the world leader in the fusty annotation movement is also the granddaddy of all "kids these days" exasperation: rap music. Rap Genius, and the expaned [Genius brand](http://genius.com) started as an annotation engine for rap, but has expanded to a huge range of documents and ideas. Both rap music and scholarly work concentrate a huge amount of referential information into limited texts, which often need to be unpacked to be understood, even by expert audiences. Explicit, open discussion of these texts democratizes what has historically been insider information.