Tagged Dates in Annotations

[ftrotter]

Feature Request Form

Problem you are trying to address with this feature

I want to make a timeline of annotations, so that I can document the sequence of events clearly.
I specifically would like to highlight the timeline of COVID response in the United States.

There are hundreds of relevant dates for this. And there lots of timelines online that have (ironically) slightly different contents. As a data journalist this conflict smacks of a lack of accountability. This seems to me a wonderful place to use annotations to organizize the data across several different sites. But those annotations would be an order of magnitude better if I could embed the date that the annotation was referencing as metadata that I could use to directly create the timeline.

Your solution

I want to add a new kind of tag, one that includes a date, datetime or date range, datetime range.

I am sure this idea has been asked for before. I cannot be the first person to think this might be useful.
But I can find no indication of how people are solving this now on the hypothes.is website.

I also see no feature requests for this topic.

[ftrotter]

Hey just want to bump this issue.. I am still interested in this!!

[robertknight]

Tags in Hypothesis are just strings. Other users who wanted to store structured information in them have done so by encoding the data in text in some way (eg. YYYY-MM-DD for a date), and then parsing those strings when they process annotation data fetched from the API or exported to CSV.

When using the Hypothesis API, you can also store additional structured information on annotations by storing arbitrary JSON in the extra field. This data however will not show up in the Hypothesis client.

I am sure this idea has been asked for before. I cannot be the first person to think this might be useful.
But I can find no indication of how people are solving this now on the hypothes.is website.

I haven't seen other requests to store dates specifically. I believe the most common request we get for tags is about specifying a pre-defined list (eg. of topics) for users to choose from.

[ftrotter]

Wow thanks for this! the YYYY-MM-DD approach is workable. Let me look into that!!

Leaving this issue open so that I can document how this approach works!!