CommentPress is a free theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. CommentPress was developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book “to enable social interaction around long-form texts.” Some of the possibilities:
- scholarly contexts: working papers, conferences, annotation projects, journals, collaborative glosses
- educational: virtual classroom discussion around readings, study groups
- journalism/public advocacy/networked democracy: social assessment and public dissection of government or corporate documents, cutting through opaque language and spin
- creative writing: workshopping story drafts, collaborative storytelling
- recreational: social reading, book clubs
Update: University Publishing In A Digital Age now set up for social annotation.
