I’d never before seen such a clear depiction of the geopolitical boundaries of pre-Columbian America, and it was a stark reminder of how we, as a people, systematically invaded and destroyed a continent of cultured peoples. We wiped away their cultures, their languages, their history, and even the memory of them, leaving only scraps behind, and we protect our current borders of land they used to live on. The American Indian Wars ended in 1924, less than a hundred years ago, but it’s not even part of the American political dialog. And we’ve whitewashed our pogroms against Native Americans, in the same way we’re presently sugar-coating slavery in history courses.

The original person who posted the picture on Facebook also included this commentary,

America before colonization…. I’ve never seen this map in my entire 25 years of formal education. Not in one history book or one lesson. This is not a mistake… Representation matters!!! #NativeHistory #BeforeAmerica

Well said. And others agreed… the post has over 150,000 shares as I write this!

But something smelled wrong to me about the map itself.

Terms like “Empire”, “Soverignty”, “Federation”, “Confederacy”, “Nation”, “Supremacy”, and “Kingdom” seemed oddly specific and out-of-place, and even seemed designed to evoke legitimacy by comparison with European state structures. Were these really accurate labels of the political systems?

The number of different Native American nations seemed far too few; was the map aggregating them in some way I’d never seen before?

The borderlines seemed too crisp; weren’t many of these peoples semi-nomadic?

Glaringly, the Olmec were much earlier than the Aztec and Maya. What era was this supposed to be be representing?

And the biggest red flag… there was no source for the data, no provenance for the map, and the label was truncated.

So I dug into it, using TinEye to find the history of the image.

I couldn’t find the original version of the map, or who made it, but I did find a Reddit post from 9 days ago entitled A map where Europe never discovered America. The image link was broken, but I found a more complete version that clearly shows the alternate history timestamp: “Aztec Calendar: Three Acatl (approx 2015 AD)”:

We aren’t taught this map, because this map isn’t real.

The reality is far more complicated, fortunately or unfortunately. It doesn’t lend itself to easy and obvious emotional appeals. Images and data visualizations make hard things easier to understand, and thus are extremely tempting to share.

A lot of my friends have already shared this map; they’re smart, well-meaning people, and most of them are Liberals of some stripe or another. Before the week is out, this map will be shared many hundreds of thousands of times. Self-styled Right-Wingers, Conservatives, and Republicans are going to jump on this. They’ll point this out as typical knee-jerk America-hating Liberals, and laugh at the fact that people who consider themselves educated and intelligent were fooled by so obvious a hoax.

Here’s where these Right-Wingers are wrong: the map is incorrect, but the sentiment and the facts informing that sentiment are correct.

It’s easy to laugh at someone for being undereducated if your political party systematically suppresses the correct information that they should be getting from their schools.

That said, we’re all responsible for our own truths, and before you put something out there in the world, or share something someone else has said, you should do some fact-checking. If what you’re saying is a matter of objective fact, rather than subjective opinion, it’s more important to be correct than to be heard, otherwise you might undermine your own valid message.

But in this busy world, if you do make a mistake and spread something that you learn later was incorrect, don’t be so hard on yourself… just correct the record. We make mistakes, and it’s silly and mean-spirited to shame others for that, especially when their intentions are good; and worse yet, it forces people to defend themselves even if they were wrong, and doesn’t reinforce self-correction. Megan, my spouse, casually shared the erroneous map, but when I pointed out the flaws, she corrected herself in her comments, frankly and openly; she didn’t delete the message, she enhanced and corrected it.

This is the lesson we can carry forward from our own history as a nation: we have made mistakes, and we will continue to make mistakes, in how we treat others and how we think about our world; we need to remember these mistakes, and correct our behavior. We need to continue to make this a more perfect nation, knowing we will fail, but with good intentions.

Megan, being a conscientious map-nerd, also found a good source of a well-researched map of the true distribution of the native tribes and nations of North America, lovingly researched and rendered by Aaron Carapella:

Megan also pointed me to a great NPR radio story about Aaron’s maps and the naming of tribes. You can support Aaron’s work by buying his maps (currently on sale).

In the modern era, when it’s so easy for information to spread, it’s our social responsibility to spread factual information and to correct misinformation. It’s important that our technological tools make that easier, not harder; Facebook and Twitter don’t currently provide good tools for either of those tasks. For example, Facebook’s “Report Photo” dialog contains only the options “It’s annoying or not interesting”, “I’m in this photo and I don’t like it”, “I think it shouldn’t be on Facebook”, and “It’s spam”; why can’t they include “It contains factual errors”? How can I politely tell someone that they have made a mistake if the tool doesn’t include a way to do so?

I’m hopeful that the work of the W3C Web Annotation Working Group will yield a set of technologies and conforming services that make fact-checking and accountability possible through decentralized annotation. (If this intrigues you, check out Hypothes.is, a socially-conscious annotation service you can use today).

In summary, here’s a few suggestions:

• Don’t post stuff you haven’t verified
• Don’t share stuff unless you’ve check the sources (Snopes is a good first step, or read an article on Wikipedia if you have more time)
• Cite your sources
• Make sure that images and data visualizations accurately reflect the facts at hand
• Don’t dismiss all facts and opinions just because some mistakes were made; get at the truth of the sentiment, don’t just nitpick
• Be suspicious when something too closely matches your own world view (i.e. beware confirmation bias)
• Learn from your mistakes
• Reward others for learning and growing
• Don’t assume you know the truth; human knowledge is always expanding

If we want a civil society in a fast-paced, hyper-connected world, we are going to need to adapt our education system, our technological tools, our social norms, and ourselves.

Update:

Samuel Cousins informed me on Twitter that the source of the map was a scifi and comic book writer, Joseph Abbott (aka liminalsoup), who posted the map on Reddit looking for feedback for a story they’re writing. I’d guessed it was probably source material for a role-playing game campaign, so I was a bit off base.

I slipped on my glasses and answered the call. Several faces popped up a few feet in front of my eyes. Okay, so it was a videocon… sigh. I muted and blanked my glasses, switched them to speakerphone, and placed them on the table, the lenses vibrating as speakers. I pulled on some clothes and rubbed my face awake, trotting into the bathroom with my glasses in my left hand. As I splashed some water on my face, I heard my name called from my glasses on the counter; “Doug, did you get in contact with them?”

“Specs, delay,” I told my glasses, and my phone agent told the other participants, politely, “Please wait for 10 seconds for a response.”

Drying my face quickly on a towel, I put my glasses back on, looked into the mirror, unblanked the camera and unmuted the mic, and replied, “Hey, folks, yes, sorry about that. I did talk to them, and they are pretty receptive to the idea. They have their own requirements, of course, but I’m confident that we can fold those into our own.” I noticed my own face in the display, broadcast from my camera’s view of my reflection in the mirror, and hastily straightened out my sleepy hair.

A few minutes later, when the topic had changed, I opened a link that someone dropped into the call, and started reading the document in the glasses’ display. With the limited space available, I scanned it in RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) mode, but quickly found it too distracting from the simultaneous conversation, requiring too much concentration. So I muted and blanked again, and walked down the hall to my office. Ensconced in front of my big screen, I re-routed the call to use the screen’s videocamera and display.

On the screen, it was easier to scan the document at my leisure. I could easily shift my focus back to the conversation when needed, without losing my place in the document. I casually highlighted a few passages to follow up on later, and made a few notes. I did the same with another document linked from the telcon, and my browser told me that this page was linked to from a document I’d annotated several months before. I marked it to read and correlate my notes in depth after the call. One thing that stood out immediately was that both documents mentioned a particular book; I was pretty sure I’d bought a physical copy a couple of years before, and I stepped over to my bookshelves. I set my glasses camera on auto-scan, looking for the title via OCR, and on the third set of shelves, my glasses blinked on a particular book; sure enough, I had a copy. I guess I could have simply ordered a digital version, but I already the physical edition handy, and sometimes I preferred having a real book in my hands.

My stomach started grumbling before the call ended. I decided to go out to lunch. Throwing the book and one of my tablets into my bag, I asked my glasses to pick a restaurant for me. It scanned the list of my favorites, and looked also for new restaurants with vegetarian food, looking for a nice balance between distance, ratings, and number of current patrons. “I’ve found a new food truck, with Indian-Mexican fusion. It’s rated 4.5, and there are several vegetarian options. Dave Cowles is eating there now. It’s a 7-minute drive. Is that okay, or should I keep looking?”

“Nope, sounds great. Call Dave, would you?” A map popped up, giving me an overview of the location, then faded away until it was needed. A symbol also popped up, indicating that my call to Dave had connected, on a private peer session.

“Hey, Doug, what’s up?”

“I was thinking of going to that food truck…”, I glanced up and to the right, and my glasses interpreted my eye gesture as a request for more context information, displaying the name of the restaurant, “… Curry Favor. You’re there now, right? Any good?”

“I just got here myself. Want me to stick around?”

“Yeah, I’ll be there in about 10 minutes.” I headed out the door, and unhooked my car’s charger before I jumped in. My glasses showed the next upcoming direction, and the car infographics; the car had a full charge. “Music”, I said, as I drove off; my car interface picked a playlist for me, a mix of my favorites I hadn’t heard in a while, and some new streaming stuff my music service thought I would like. As I got out of range of my house’s wifi, my glasses switched seamlessly to the car’s wifi. It was an easy drive, with my glasses displaying the optimal route and anticipating shifting traffic patterns and lights, but I still thought how nice it would be to buy one of the self-piloted cars. My car knew my destination from my glasses, and it alerted me that a parking spot had just opened up very near the food truck, so I confirmed and it reserved the spot; I’d pay an extra 50¢ to hold the spot until I arrived, but it was well worth it. My glasses read out the veggie menu options out loud on demand, and I chose the naan burrito with palak paneer and chick peas; my glasses placed my order in advance via text.

I pulled into my parking space, and my glasses blinked an icon telling me the sub-street sensor had registered my car’s presence. Great parking spot… I was right across the street from the food truck. I walked over to the benches where Dave sat. “Hey, Dave.”

We exchanged a few words, but my glasses told me my order was ready in a flash. I went to the window, and picked up my burrito; the account total came up in my view, and I picked a currency to pay it; I preferred to use my credit union’s digital currency, and was glad when the food truck’s agent accepted it. “Thanks, man,” I smiled at the cashier.

Dave and I hadn’t seen each other in a while, and we caught up over lunch. It turned out he was working on a cool new mapping project, and I drilled him for some details; it wasn’t my field, but it was interesting, and you never knew when a passing familiarity might come in handy. With his okay, my glasses recorded part of our conversation so I could make more detailed notes, and his glasses sent me some links to look at later. We finished our food quickly –it was tasty, so I left a quick positive review– and walked to a nearby coffee shop to continue the conversation. While we were talking, Dave recommended an app that I bought, and I also bought a song from the coffee shop that caught my ear from their in-house audio stream; Dave and the coffee shop each got a percentage of the sale. I learned that the coffee shop got an even bigger share of the song, because the musician had played at their shop and they’d negotiated a private contract, in exchange for promotion of her tour, which popped up in my display; that was okay, I liked supporting local businesses, and I filed away the tour dates in my calendar in case it was convenient for me to go to the show.

Dave went back to work, and I settled into the coffee shop to do some reading. First I read some of the book I’d brought, making sure to quickly glasses-scan the barcode first so I could keep a log; I found several good pieces of information, which I highlighted and commented on; my glasses tracked my gaze to OCR the text for storage and anchoring, and I subvocalized the notes. I then followed up on the links from earlier; my agent had earned its rate, having found several important correlations between the documents and my notes, as well as highly-reputed annotations from others on various annotation repos, and I thought more about next steps. I followed a few quick links to solidify my intuition, but on one link, I got stopped abruptly at an ad-wall; for whatever reason, this site insisted I watch a 15-second video rather than just opting-in to a deci-cent micropayment, as I usually did when browsing. I tolerated the video –unfortunately, if I took my glasses off while it played, the ad would know– only to find that the whole site was ad-based… intolerable, so I did some keyword searching to find an alternate site for the information.

Light reading and browsing was fine in a public place, but to get any real work done, I needed privacy. I strolled back to my car –my glasses reminding me where I’d parked– and I returned home. Back in my office, I put on some light music, and started coding. I started with a classic HTML-CSS-SVG-JS doc-app component framework on my local box, because I was old-school, and went mobile from there, adding annotated categories to words and phrases for meaning-extraction, customizing the triple-referenced structured API, dragging in a knowledge-base and vocabulary for the speech interface and translation engine, and establishing variable-usage contract terms with service providers (trying to optimize for low-cost usage when possible, and tweaking so the app would automatically switch service providers before it hit the next payment threshold… I’m cheap, and most of my users are too). I didn’t worry much about tweaking the good-enough library-default UI, since most users would barely or rarely see any layout, but rather would interact with the app through voice commands and questions, and see only microviews; I paid more attention to making sure that the agents would be able to correctly index and correlate the features and facts. Just as I was careful to separate style from content, I was careful to separate semantics from content. At some point, I reflected, AIs would get powerful enough so that information workers wouldn’t have such an easy time making a living; I wondered if we’d even need markup or APIs or standards at all, or if the whole infrastructure would be dynamic and ad-hoc. Maybe the work I was doing was making me obsolete. “‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished,” I thought to myself wryly.

I put the finishing touches on the app prototype, wrote some final tests, and ran through a manual scenario walk-through to pass the time while the test framework really put the app through its paces, spawning a few hundred thousand virtual unique concurrent users. Other than a few glitches to be polished up, it seemed to work well. I was pretty proud of this work; the app gave me real-time civic feedback, including drill-down visualization, on public policy statements, trawling news sites, social networks, and annotation servers for sentiment and fact-checking; it balanced opinion with cost-benefit risk-scenarios weighted by credibility and likelihood, and managed it all with voting records of representatives. It also tracked influence, either by lobbying or donations or inferred connections, and correlated company ownership chains and investments, to give a picture on who was pushing who’s buttons, and it would work equally well for boycotting products based on company profiles as it would on holding politicians accountable. As part of the ClearGov Foundation’s online voting system, it stood a chance of reforming government, though it was getting more adoption in South America and Africa than it was in the US so far. Patience, patience…

Megan came home from work with dinner from a locavore kitchen; the front door camera alerted me to her approach, and I saw she had her hands full. “Open front door,” I told the house as I rose to help her. We ate in front of the wallscreen, watching some static, non-interactive comedy streams; we were both too tired to “play-along” with plots, character POV, or camera angles, and it wasn’t really our style anyway. I hadn’t gotten enough rest the night before, so I turned in early to read; the mattress turned off the bedside light when it sensed my heart-rate and breathing slow into sleep.

Note: This story of the Web and life in 2024 is clearly fictional; nobody would hire someone who’d worked in web standards to do real programming work.

You might be an annotator, too. If you think you might be, you should come to our support workshop in San Francisco in April.

I first realized I had an annotation problem about 3 months ago, at the Books in Browsers conference. I saw a great talk by Dan Whaley and Jake Hartnell of Hypothes.is, about their annotation engine, built on top of the Annotator project.

They demoed their browser extension, showing how they could select a passage of text, open up a sidebar to leave a comment on that specific passage; when the web page is reloaded, the extension finds the original selections for all the annotations on that page, and highlights the specific passage as you select and read each annotation. And you could even reply to annotations in a threaded conversation… annotating the annotations ^{(whoah, dude, that’s so meta!)}.

I’d wanted this functionality for WebPlatform.org for a while; we have a primitive annotation system, but it only anchors on the section level, which is still better than comments at the bottom of the page, or on a separate page entirely. I immediately saw the potential in Hypothes.is’ much more sophisticated script library; as a tool for suggesting improvements, requesting expanded coverage, asking and answering questions, and generally peer-reviewing collaborative documents, this is a tried-and-true UI that’s a critical feature of office tools like Word and Google Docs.

Then I realized that we could use this same tool for W3C’s specs, to allow simpler and much more immediate and contextual feedback than the current clumsy system of firehose email lists and bug trackers.

In hindsight, I see that the signs of my annotation problem go back many years. I was jonesing for a way to improve the flow and timeliness of feedback from the average developer or designer, not just those working at big member companies (one of my main goals as W3C Developer Relations Lead). To get my fix, I’d prototyped a crappy annotation system (though I didn’t know that’s what it was) soon after I first started with W3C, but scrapped it when a less-crappy system was deployed on the HTML5 spec to let people file bugs right from the spec. It didn’t satisfy me, though… it’s not the same as a true annotation system where the annotations persist in context.

Once I saw that sweet, sweet new annotation engine, I had to have it. So, later this year, we’ll be experimenting in a couple of Working Groups (starting with the Audio WG) with allowing true annotations as a primary feedback channel. (I’ll keep you posted.)

And these spec annotations don’t have to be from humans; we already have automated scripts that decorate the specs with notifications of test coverage or implementation status, and what are those but a specialized kind of annotation? Yeah, see? Once you get a taste of annotations, everything starts to look like an annotation.

And I mean everything! (Well, no I don’t… but I do mean a lot of things!) Think about it: what’s your primary contributive activity on the web? Reading a blog or article or kitten meme or infographic is a consumer activity; sharing those artifacts, on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, or wherever, is another main activity, a distributive activity; leaving a comment on that artifact, or replying to someone else’s comment, is also a contributive activity, just as much as creating the artifact in the first place, and (let’s face it) far more common for most of us than creating the primary artifact (it took me ages to get around to writing this blog post, let me tell you).

So, yeah; most of our online contributive activity is some form of annotation. Whether your comment is in your tweet, or at the bottom of the article, or in some sort of threaded forum, when you’re talking about some other document that you’re linking to, you’re annotating.

Here’s a simple chart that shows just how deep I’ve gotten myself into this addiction (based on an original by Dan Whaley):

Once I realized that annotations were what I’d been craving, I started looking for them wherever I could. I found at least 40 companies that are not yet W3C members doing web annotations in one form or another; from ebook readers that let you share notes, to hip sites like Rap Genius or Medium or Quartz, to education/research tools like Diigo, to more traditional (but innovative) sites like New York Times or Financial Times. Why were they all doing annotations? Because having the comments in context, right there where the reader is looking, leads to more incisive, directed, relevant comments. Because the immediacy of annotations lets people point out small errors in otherwise good articles, or gems in otherwise mediocre articles. Because the reader comments can add value to the article, rather than just be a misinformed screed that sinks to the bottom of the page.

I dug into the topic for a couple months. I told myself that I could stop anytime I wanted, but deep down, I knew the truth.

I wanted to standardize annotations.

W3C had an experimental project back in the late 1990s called Annotea, but it didn’t really make it into standards. So, what could usefully be standardized? I have a few ideas.

Robust Anchoring

A lot of great research has gone into this, but it remains a hard problem. How do you link to a passage of text that might have moved or changed (possibly due to an annotation that suggested the change!), and which doesn’t have a built-in anchor in the markup? What if it’s the multi-page view of the article, rather than the single-page view? What if it’s a new version at a different URL, but is mostly the same content (like a W3C spec)?

Hypothes.is has a nice multiple-factor selection algorithm that is pretty rigorous about finding the right passage even across changes. I think that would be a useful feature to have in browsers.

But even then, they have to insert tags into the content in order to highlight the passage, and this is a pain if there are multiple overlapping annotations or if the annotation crosses over element boundaries (like the last sentence in one paragraph and the first in the next paragraph). It would be nice to be able to style a passage like you would an active selection, with a CSS selection pseudo-element that only allows you to change the color, background-color, and outline properties, which don’t affect reflow of document layout and are thus pretty computationally inexpensive.

Federation and Syndication

It’s great that forward-looking companies are providing an annotation interface to their own content, but it still doesn’t lead to really free, open conversations;  for controversial sites, they still control which comments are approved, and that can lead to abuse just as surely as spam and trolling can. Individual commenting or annotation systems lead to fragmented online identities, and you still get personal-data silos even with distributed commenting systems like Livefyre or Disqus, or distributed logins with OpenId, Facebook, and Twitter. I’d like to be able to publish and aggregate comments across multiple systems at the same time. I’d like to be able to maintain a personal identity (or multiple pseudonyms or even anonymity) and authorship for my online content, not beholden to individual publishers (because that’s what commenting systems are: publishers), to share with specific groups or friends or just keep my notes to myself, and I’d like to be able to see comments by a particular user across the web, not just on a few sites. This feeds into the goal that some people call IndieWeb. Annotation services with multiple publishing channels could enable that.

Annotation Events

One of the parties that should be able to publish my annotations, if they wish, is the publisher of the original article. When Google tested the annotation waters with the now-defunct Sidewiki a few years ago, Jeff Jarvis rightfully complained that it effectively stole value from his own blog, by stealing away value-adding comments.

And it’s also hard for an annotation service to know when an annotation should be made, because many webapps swallow events.

To address these issues, I’d like to see a pair of annotation events: annotationstart that signals that a selection has been made, and annotationend that notifies the web page that an annotation has been made and where you can find the feed for it, so you can retrieve it via a REST API and bring in the best annotations into your own commenting system.

Data Model

To have this kind of syndication and federation, you need to have a common data model.

I had previously noticed that some folks had started a W3C Open Annotation Community Group, but it seemed a bit… Capital-S-Semantic for my tastes.

But once I read their spec and looked past the descriptions of RDF and SPARQL, I saw a sound data model that would be useful for interchanging annotations between services. Their model seems large, and at first glance might be overly complicated (or, more charitably, “robust”), but you don’t need to use all parts of it for every instance; an annotation can be really simple.

I personally don’t think that most people creating annotations will want to express them in RDF, but that shouldn’t matter. So long as an annotation can be expressed in an agreed-upon serialization, like a subset of HTML, it can be transformed into whatever representation the back-end system wants (including RDF).

Personally, I’d like to see a <note> element in HTML, with a client-side API for scroll position of a selections and other things. This could be used for comments (I don’t like the use of <aside> for this), and also for footnotes (like the clever way Wikipedia does them), which is a big issue for digital publishing.

 Join Us!

These are just some of the ideas that we’ve been noodling on in our proposed charter for a new W3C Web Annotations Working Group. If you have other ideas, come share them with us in the upcoming W3C Annotations Workshop, April 2nd in San Francisco, collocated with the I Annotate 2014 summit. At the end of the summit, we want to finalize the charter and hopefully launch a dedicated working group.

You don’t have to be alone. Join us. It helps to talk about it.

Disclaimer

Despite the playful tone of this blogpost, I don’t mean to make light of serious, harmful addictions, like Candy Crush Saga.

Update:

In the unlikely event that you found this blog post interesting but a bit too brief, you should listen to Jen Simmons and me talk about web annotations on her excellent The Web Ahead podcast.