Introduction

Greetings all,

I am Jake Hartnell, and I've been working for Hypothes.is for almost a year and a half. 

Previously, I was in graduate school at the Berkeley School of Information, where I was looking into annotation, linked data, the semantic web, information economics, and digital publishing. While there, a few friends and I also started Epub.js: a JavaScript library for working with and rendering Epubs in the browser.

I'm interested in many aspects of annotation. Here are a few:
How humans will use it: discussion, copy-editing, peer review, note-taking, etc. 
Linked Data / Semantic Web: Annotation, provides the ability to layer not only discussion over the web, but also computer readable data. Importantly this layer of linked data or semantic markup could be crowdsourced (or even annotated by bots), hopefully creating some cool open datasets. 
Meta-browsing: The idea that it should be easier to discover content about content than it currently is a the web. Imagine that by looking at a webpage we could see discussion, annotations, and thoughts coming from all over the web: you see Reddit discussions and tweets about the page you are reading, newspapers articles that cited from it, and whatever else people say about it around the web. 
Design: fundamental to annotation is the spacial relationship: from the human perspective what makes something an "annotation" comes down to visual presentation. Obviously, there are numerous challenges here (not all of which fall under the scope of this working group). This is something we have been exploring quite intensely at Hypothes.is.

I'm also a science fiction writer (have a free book if you want), and very interested in ways content makers can utilize annotation.  

Needless to say, I'm excited by the progress that has been made by the Open Annotation Community Group, and very pleased to be participating in this group.

Regards,
Jake Hartnell

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@JakeHartnell
@Epubjs
@Hypothes_is