The Iraq Study Group Report experimental annotation project

December 21, 2006 7:10 AM

The Iraq Study Group Report, annotated, an experimental project by The Institute for the Future of the Book.
posted by stbalbach (9 comments total)

(We strongly recommend viewing the site in Firefox.)
posted by stbalbach at 7:17 AM on December 21, 2006

"I hope we don't treat this as a fruit salad, and say, 'I like this but I don't like that.'"
—James A. Baker III

So is this one of those Jell-o fruit salads? Because sometimes it's harder to get what you want with those. You just have to take it however it's molded.
posted by DngMouse at 7:48 AM on December 21, 2006

I'm not sure what the point of this is. The ISGR seems to be dead on arrival as the president seems determined ignore any rational arguments and is going fight this war forever. Why argue over the fine points of a study that no one is going to follow?
posted by octothorpe at 7:59 AM on December 21, 2006

It's a cool way to present a book, regardless of whether whomever reads for Bush decides to check it out or not.
posted by chunking express at 8:06 AM on December 21, 2006

Nice design and very well done UI. It'll be interesting to see how well this scales once there are more comments. As much I like open participitory commenting sites I think a project like this might work better with a "round table" of a few experts. Or perhaps just a filter mode in which you can toggle between a small set and the general public. Also perhaps a "factual" annotation mode (say where you click on a name/place and get a quick write up/context for that item (or a link to wikipedia?) In any case, cool site.
posted by gwint at 8:17 AM on December 21, 2006

This is an amazing idea and very well designed. It reminds me of the highly annotated copy of the Wasteland that was posted here a while back. Some design tweaks are needed as it is somewhat hard to read the comments (too small of a box, should be expanded to share as much screen space as the actual book). Good design, like good engineering, is about taking away extraneous elements until the most efficient product remains.
posted by geoff. at 8:47 AM on December 21, 2006

Regardless of the Report's currency (and I do agree that it is best considered DOA), I think the if:book folks did an absolutely brilliant job designing the annotation UI. Their work here begins to sketch in the outlines of a prospective best practice for the release of public documents in a networked democracy.

I am proud as hell that they're working on my next book - and if you think paragrapgh-level annotation is useful, I'm curious to see what you-all think when the functionality is extended down to word level.
posted by adamgreenfield at 9:07 AM on December 21, 2006

If you want to search it, me & a few others got this up in 45 min. after they released the report.
posted by jefgodesky at 10:36 AM on December 21, 2006

I wonder if the Django Book was the main inspiration for this. It features a very similar implementation of the same idea.
posted by grrarrgh00 at 6:19 PM on December 21, 2006