I love annotation tools. I love the adjacencies they permit. I love the possibilities they engender if we take the opportunity to live in them.  They let me hide in the hedgerows and margins of the text.  Safe and singing.

One of the tools that I have always asked for and not gotten has been a way to easily export annotations.  Happily that feature has arrived.  I don’t know how long it has been available, but I was looking through some annotations that Daniel Bassill and Kevin Hodgson had written and noted the share icon.  I click it and lo there was an export function.

You can save all or part of the annotations with different file attachments.  I saved mine into a text file that would be easy to copy and paste and edit in etherpad. Why?  I want to make the contributions made by fellow annotators worth their time.  It is inherently useful to make notes, but it could be way more useful if we could create digital artifacts that were even more useful.  Time is short and the demands we make on our collaborators might be more fair if we actually used their contributions to learn and do more.  Yeah, radical notion, but that is what my attempt below is, an attempt to take all the annotations and remake, remix, and transmogrify.  It might still not amount to a hill of beans, but it won’t be from lack of trying.

I will be working on these annotations over the weekend and you can see what is happening in the etherpad below.  When I am done I will create a video with all the revisions I have made to the original text.  I suspect there will be some poetry and some gratefulness to those who have contributed. I will start by being grateful to Hypothes.is for adding this annotation export feature.  Huzzah!