Hyper Academia Experiment

Abstract

Hyper Academia is an experiment to test Mintter’s Open Hypermedia System with Academic communities to enable a more actionable and collaborative academic publishing, while respecting their Digital Rights. In this paper we offer an overview of the platform and how it has evolved to tailor the needs of Academic users.

Hypermedia Systems (historical perspective)

Include references to Engelbart, Nelson and NIC.

Mintter Open Hypermedia System - An overview

Mintter is Local First and decentralized interactive content. It uses the Open Hypermedia Protocol (OHP) format, licensed under Apache 2.0. The OHP has certain properties that makes content actionable and interactive while protecting authors attribution:

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It is linkable

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Reusable

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Easy to comment and prone for discussions.

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Augmenting human collaboration and knowledge creation

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Metadata

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Linkbase

Mintter is inspired around Knowledge Communities social mechanisms (from Knowledge Theory) and Network Improved Communities (NIC).

Authenticated information and web of trust

P2P and Dedicated Servers or Sites

Academic Use Cases

Academic research as an individual knowledge worker

Right now, academics have to deal with tons of documents and references, and usually they are stored in really hard to edit and annotate formats like PDFs.

Open hypermedia system could enable academics to store that information into a much more usable format, like blocks and sections that could be directly addressed anywhere, transcluded and composed to produce new pieces of work, new research, keeping the track with bi-directional links of all the references used during the document. This could make it simpler to follow the train of thought, and it's clearly inspired by the world that Memex was originally introduced in, "As we may think", by Vannevar Bush.

Collaborative writting of research papers

Besides the individual use, there is also huge potential in this system to be used as a collaborative tool to produce new paper and research. Using the hypermedia systems, users would be able to collaborate on a live document sending their contributions in an asynchronous way to compose the complete final paper.

Another advantage of this system is that commenting is enabled and everything can be addressed up to the single character. So whenever there is an editorial process to review and refine the paper, you could keep track of all the changes, you could keep track of all the comments, annotations and references in a very transparent way so everyone participating in the process has a clearer overview of the whole development pace and the lines taken.

Specifics of research papers

Metadata / Authorship

Footnotes

Bibliography

DOI <- Linking to specific versions

Arxiv versioning to certain branches

Groupal conversations about a particular subject

One very common activity of research groups is reading sessions or even with the students in the classes, some activities where everyone reviews and shares their opinions on particular pieces of work, famous research papers, PhD dissertations, etc. This kind of conversation usually are kept to synchronous occasions or in-person meetings but could be also expanded to include a synchronous collaboration, commenting and building more in-depth arguments by providing links to other elements in the Hypermedia system, enabling everyone to check the original sources and the references, instead of keeping those as side notes at the end of the final paper.