Fermat's Library is a great idea. Curating who can annotate documents (professors, scientists, domain experts) will add a lot more value than Genius's scheme to have everyone "Annotate the World".
The Bitcoin whitepaper was also a great choice for this type of project. Terse, spartan language where every word of every sentence is completely necessary and contributes meaningfully in some way. It's not hard to understand (unlike the majority of academic research which seems to be intentionally obfuscated), but it benefits greatly from a bit of context and color.
Nice work! Hoping to see more interesting papers in the future.
Wow, this project (Fermat's Library) looks so awesome. It's similar to an idea I've had for a while, but my pedagogic skills are feeble. I started translating some collected works of the famous, old French mathematicians, but ended up with just a few fragments due to other interests and my weak French skills.
Agreed that this is awesome! Would love to also see Genius-style annotations, where the comments are on lines instead of the margins. I think this makes it slightly easier to read the text without scanning back and forth between the text and margins to check if what you're reading has been annotated
If papers would be text formatted or if GitHub could render latex on the fly then this would exist already. It doesn't b/c PDF is how papers are dissemeniated - so it's great somebody took care of that gap!
Maybe a another good occasion to mention that coursera currently offers a Bitcoin MOOC run by some guys from Princeton - it's quite awesome.
This is great. Regarding the tools used to do annotations, has any thought (possibly elsewhere) been given to (a) format(s) one can easily save, modify, share etc? I.e. doesn't require a (proprietary?) server, or even something that could be integrated with a federated wiki?
I always wished there was a platform that allowed us to annotate any paper, collaboratively. I've always found it rather strange that e.g. Google Scholar doesn't offer something like this.
Anyway, this is cool. The only thing missing is a comments section.
Getting weird bug in Safari (Version 8.0.7 (10600.7.12)) where if I click an annotation then close it, I don't see the rest of the annotated bubbles on the left.
The Bitcoin whitepaper was also a great choice for this type of project. Terse, spartan language where every word of every sentence is completely necessary and contributes meaningfully in some way. It's not hard to understand (unlike the majority of academic research which seems to be intentionally obfuscated), but it benefits greatly from a bit of context and color.
Nice work! Hoping to see more interesting papers in the future.