When I browse the web, I often need to take notes on a site or highlight excerpts from articles. Some time ago I presented Outline which allowed this to be done, but unfortunately the site no longer seems to exist.
So I did some research, and I came across Hyothes.is a real alternative to Outline. This alternative is all the more interesting because it is actually the tool that Outline relied on to annotate and highlight web pages! So I am not disoriented and I can now rely on a truly functional tool.
Let’s find out together!
Annotate and highlight the web with Hypothesis
Hypethes.is is a project open source which was born from the desire of its developers to allow students to work together on texts online. Indeed, beyond the simple fact of annotating web pages, this tool allows you to share your annotations with a community of people with whom you are in contact.
But it's not so much this aspect that will interest us in this article. It's rather the annotation and highlighting tool itself that I wanted to share with you.
To use Hypothesis, you will need to follow these steps:
- Create a free account on the site
- Install the Chrome extension or add a bookmarklet to your favorite browser
For my part, I preferred to add the bookmarklet on Chrome because I use too many extensions and I didn't want to add more.
The principle of a bookmarklet Is simple, it is a link that you store as a favorite on your browser and which will call a small JavaScript program… in our case to launch the Hypothesis tool.
To install the bookmarklet on your web browser, simply drag the red “Hypothesis Bookmarklet” button to your bookmarks bar.
So, when you feel the urge to annotate or highlight a site, all you have to do is click on the bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar to launch the Hypothesis tool.
A bar will open on the right side of your browser indicating that the tool has been launched. You can then select any text excerpt with your mouse and a small bubble will open to offer you to annotate the extract or to highlight it.
All the elements that you will annotate or highlight will then be visible in the Hypothesis bar (on the right of your browser). But what is really interesting is that if you come back later on an article or a site on which you have already worked with Hypothesis, you will find all your annotations after having clicked on the Bookmarklet button.
Also, since you need a user account, everything is saved on the Hypothesis website, allowing you to group together everything you have done! It is really very powerful and very effective.
And since you will be able to invite people to groups that you can create, this gives you the opportunity to do collaborative work by sharing your annotations! In short, Hypothesis is really a great alternative to Outline since it is actually the engine that was used by the latter… You now have everything you need to annotate and highlight excerpts from web pages and articles.
