I kinda want to like Fermat's library - the concept is good - but mostly I hate reading articles on their websites. I would much, much rather just read the raw PDF, and it annoys me they do not link it.
Rendering is slow, buggy, and results in choppy scrolling. The annotations feels out of place UI-wise, but often also content-wise.
Unfortunately, http://fermatslibrary.com/ is down at the moment so I can't comment with an informed opinion.
But there are two killer features that most annotation software fail to supply:
1. print-ability. Physical copies are important.
2. Accurate rendering (related to 1). There's a pretty high barrier to overcome before someone else's inline notes are more valuable than knowing that I'm looking at exactly what the authors intended for me to look at.
That said, the scientific PDF annotation space is ripe for disruption. IDK how meaningful that market is (directly or indirectly), but someone could definitely step in and own it with something that's even an iota better than current options.
> But there are two killer features that most annotation software fail to supply:
I don't know what kind of annotation software you usually use, but I have yet to annotate a PDF and lose the ability of 1 and/or 2.
As for crowd-annotation services, I can only think of genius and medium. Genius does not preserve original format, but that is obviously unreasonable to expect (they're songs!). Medium is its own format, so rendering is accurate by definition.
I've mostly dabbled with preview, Adobe reader, Zotero and Mendeley. You can in all do whatever advance shit you'd like in 3rd party software and copy-paste.
I haven't been to the site in a while, so maybe they changed now. What turned me off the first few times I clicked a link on HN was the constant stream of "subscribe-to-our-newsletter" pop-ups and "hey-add-your-comment-here" bouncing boxes.
Reading academic papers requires focus and concentration. While I like the idea of comments on papers, I found that site too full of petty distractions to serve that purpose.
"I've been working on a project to implement a feature similar to PDF native 'custom annotations,' but using an external JSON file. The idea is to allow a more hacker-friendly way to add javascript-powered interactivity to a PDF file, and allow a js-based-document-viewer to interact with other elements in a web page. Somewhat like using an external subtitles-file for a video instead of hard-coded subs, allowing you to use things like HTML5 tracks for generating events etc. (manipulating PDFs internal workings is hard work for those who create documents/content, and the JS support is old-fashioned, if I remember rightly).."
I think mostly I liked PDF's precise, fixed control over layout, and wanted to be able to program some js onClick callbacks on top of it in an easy way. Maybe sometime I will revisit the ideas, see if there was something there.
This approach could save journalism from the scourge of fake news. The specific issues are:
1) opinions masquerading as news.
2) misinterpretation of facts/data.
3) misrepresenting the facts.
4) cherry picking (not showing full picture, such that the meaning changes).
5) insufficient context / history about the topic.
All these issues with reporting could be mitigated with expert + crowd annotation — esp where the author and the subject (say people mentioned in the news) can come and add more context.
When objective function is speed and clicks, sometimes depth on a topic suffers. This is true whether news is human or machine generated. In that case, continual engagement with the original article, amendments and updates become a very important tool.
If journalism is defined as a search for truth, then news annotation could be the thing that saves it.
I am not so sure; there's rarely a strong incentive to misrepresent a paper on e.g. number theory, but that is not the case when it comes to issues in politics or business.
We already see this to some extent with Wikipedia-- the pages on math and hard science are generally accurate and well-written.
Biographies are much more a mixed-bag, even aside from the fact that the subject themselves can edit their page, I know there are companies that offer to create or manage wiki pages for PR purposes.
It might be better to take an approach similar to "open science".
Have the reporters publish their raw footage and interview transcripts to address misrepresentation/cherry-picking, and get them to commit to answering follow-up questions from readers to allow the readers to get additional information.
Having more of a back-and-forth could improve the quality of the reporting, allow for spurious objections to be debunked, or ensure that the author gets taken to task if their bias taints the story.
This seems time/capital intensive and therefore impractical in the age of listicles, but on further consideration I realize that many "name brand" bloggers popular on HN essentially follow this model-- for example, Matt Levine and Brian Krebs.
However it's not clear whether their model can be applied to all areas of journalistic interest instead of specific niches, or if it requires a rare kind of individual to make it work.
The really tough barrier is getting enough people with the required expertise to do the annotation.
Annotation sites like to say, "Hey, we have this paper and we have this paper." Meanwhile, thousands of new scientific papers are published every day. Of course, the majority of those are not going to be of interest to any journalist. But even when we whittle the pile down to those that are, there is still a huge amount of work to do, and some qualified person has to do it.
And why would they do it? I'm an academic researcher. So I have the required expertise to do this kind of annotation for papers in my narrow specialty. But my life is full with my own research and publishing and teaching and advising and committees and paperwork .... And every October I have to write up a report on my achievements for the past year. Getting a paper published counts for a lot in that report. Annotating someone else's paper is not going to count for much at all. If I start substituting the latter for the former, then my career is going to go down the tubes pretty rapidly.
I think it would be great if this kind of thing could actually happen. But I don't see how to make it happen.
You don't need to have an increase in fake news to have an increase in the perception of fake news. Another way to get an increase in the perception of fake news is to change the structural graph through which news propagates. The two most outspoken people I know of on the topic of the problem of fake news both happen to be twitter users (Elon Musk, Donald Trump).
The Science paper I linked was meant to show that the twitter graph has properties which spread fake news through its part of the news propagation graph. The people I referenced were meant to show that people on the graph with such a property are talking about the fake news problem as if it is real. Taken together, my response to you was trying to get at the idea that fake news, even if not a thing from the perspective of one node on overall news propagation graph, can seem very real from another position on the graph.
So basically, I disagree with the claim that fake news doesn't exist, in a subtle way.
It is, and has been for decades.
Usually, when I read articles on a topic which I have researched, I find the reporting tends to be "wrong" in some sense.
Charitably this can be blamed on time or space constraints: the articles need to be ready for publication while the story is relevant, so the author has insufficient time to achieve expertise; or even if the author is an expert, they are incentivized to publish only the most interesting (and perhaps most superficial) details on the subject.
Less charitably, you might suspect that the author (or their editor) has a bias depending on what they elide or emphasize.
Herman & Chomsky wrote about this topic[0] examining the various filters that determine what gets reported and from what angle.
However, it's recently become politically controversial to acknowledge this fact, I think because Trump uses "fake news" to disqualify criticism of himself and his administration[1].
But let's not pretend that journalism is without faults or bias just because (on average) the virtues of the fourth estate outweigh their flaws.
1. He's hardly the first person to have issues with his press coverage, but it seems like he's getting a bit more traction with his complaints.
It helps that he has an observably hostile relationship with the press.
But the term "fake news" was originally applied to right-wing blogspam/memes that showed up during the 2016 election, which were highly slanted, based on cherry-picked information if not outright lies.
You don't need Trump for this, just taking the term for what it says. Are there are various quality problems with journalism? Sure. Is journalism as a field plagued by a problem of straight-up, unchecked fabrication of 'news'? Not really. That problem is not a journalism problem.
It doesn't have to be literally false to misinform, and informing the public is (in my opinion) the main point of journalism.
How erroneous/slanted does it have to be before we can assert fakeness?
I think it's fair to say that if I have a worse understanding of the world as a result of consuming news media then that constitutes "fake news".
It has to be fake news to call it fake news. Simple term, simple criterion. If you want to talk about other ways in which news can be inaccurate, you can use one of the many terms for that. It is not 'fair to say' that something that isn't actually fake news is fake news. That's a weird thing to insist on when complaining about inaccuracies.
I am not using the phrase ‘fake news’ in the way Trump uses it (to seed doubt and cast aspersions). I mean to say: “sometimes, I know the details (inside story) of a story/situation. When I read an article about it - I can always tell precisely what got misreported or misinterpreted - which causes me to wonder, what else is getting (mis-)reported like that - about things I don’t know”. Probably the choice of the phrase ‘fake news’ is too extreme. I meant to convey a more subtle point.
That is using 'fake news' the way Trump uses it - 'news reporting I don't like or I think is in some way wrong' rather than 'news that is actually fake with the deliberate intent to mislead'. What you seem to be talking about is sometimes called 'Gell-Mann amnesia effect' - a term I also think is pretty awful (for different reasons) but again, that's not 'fake news'.
Leaving that aside and to your actual point - one way to think about this is 'what major journalistic mishap could have been fixed/avoided by crowd annotation'. Judith Miller's reporting in the run up to the Iraq war? Wen Ho Lee's case? Jayson Blair? It doesn't seem obvious to me it would have made a whit of a difference in any of those nor many others.
Rendering is slow, buggy, and results in choppy scrolling. The annotations feels out of place UI-wise, but often also content-wise.