5 ms·

Fermat’s Library – Annotating Academic Papers Every Week

80 points by lainon 8y ago

wodenokoto 8y ago
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.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  > Rendering is... buggy Unfortunately, http://fermatslibrary.com/ 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.
  - wodenokoto 8y ago
    > 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.
    - henrikeh 8y ago
      What programs do you use? Can they make annotations with math typesetting, markup, links and images?
      - wodenokoto 8y ago
        Technically, yes. In practice no. 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.
- avian 8y ago
  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.
a_d 8y ago
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. HN, thoughts?
- pvg 8y ago
  journalism from the scourge of fake news. Journalism isn't suffering from a scourge of fake news.
  - JoshCole 8y ago
    http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 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).
    - pvg 8y ago
      I don't really understand how this is a response to what I said.
      - JoshCole 8y ago
        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.
cf 8y ago
This reminds me a lot of https://via.hypothes.is/ https://via.hypothes.is/ . Could someone familiar with both explain why to prefer one service over another?
- pvg 8y ago
  The thing you linked seems to be 'annotations generally' whereas Fermat's library is 'curated sequence of academic papers with an annotations feature'
  - cf 8y ago
    Thanks!
davidzweig 8y ago
In 2014 I had an idea, didn't go anywhere though: "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).." https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.pdf-js/24DK2E7I5nc https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.pdf-js/2... 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.

80 points by lainon 8y ago

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.

throwawayjava 8y ago
> Rendering is... buggy Unfortunately, http://fermatslibrary.com/ 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.
- wodenokoto 8y ago
  > 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.
  - henrikeh 8y ago
    What programs do you use? Can they make annotations with math typesetting, markup, links and images?
    - wodenokoto 8y ago
      Technically, yes. In practice no. 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.
avian 8y ago
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.

a_d 8y ago

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. HN, thoughts?

pvg 8y ago
journalism from the scourge of fake news. Journalism isn't suffering from a scourge of fake news.
- JoshCole 8y ago
  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 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).
  - pvg 8y ago
    I don't really understand how this is a response to what I said.
    - JoshCole 8y ago
      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.

cf 8y ago

This reminds me a lot of https://via.hypothes.is/ https://via.hypothes.is/ . Could someone familiar with both explain why to prefer one service over another?

pvg 8y ago
The thing you linked seems to be 'annotations generally' whereas Fermat's library is 'curated sequence of academic papers with an annotations feature'
- cf 8y ago
  Thanks!

davidzweig 8y ago

In 2014 I had an idea, didn't go anywhere though: "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).." https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.pdf-js/24DK2E7I5nc https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.pdf-js/2... 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.