This page is Education Tool Project 2026 in numbers: how many people are reading it, how much conversation is happening in its margins, and how much of it is being written or corrected. It exists so that none of that has to be guessed at, or asked for, or assembled by hand.
It rebuilds itself every Sunday from the systems that already hold the data — Hypothes.is for the annotations, GitHub for the repository — and proposes the new version as a pull request. A week in which nothing moved produces no pull request at all, so this page changing is itself a signal.
Nothing on this page names a reader. The margin is a place where people think out loud, and it stays usable because nobody is being scored in it, so the annotation figures below are totals — how many notes, on how many pages, from how many accounts — and never a list of who wrote them.
Readership
Visitor numbers are not repeated here — they live in the site’s own analytics dashboard, which is public. Anyone can open it, with no login and no account: the readership dashboard for social-research-methods.confused4now.org.
It shows how many people have visited the book, which pages they spent time on, and where they arrived from, over whatever period you select. It counts visits rather than identities — no cookies, nothing that follows a reader from one site to another — which is why it is a fair measure of interest and a poor one of anything else.
Discussion in the margins
Every page of the book can be annotated: a reader selects a passage, writes a note, and the note stays attached to that exact sentence for everyone who comes after. Those notes are held by Hypothes.is rather than in the book’s own files, which is why they are counted here rather than being visible in the repository.
There are no annotations yet in the public layer at social-research-methods.confused4now.org, which is where the book’s discussion currently lives. That is the ordinary reading for a book that has not yet been set as coursework: a margin fills during a teaching term, not before one, and the first cohort pointed at the book is what will change this number.
Contribution
The book is a public Git repository, so every change to it — a rewritten section, a corrected apostrophe, a workflow like the one that builds this page — is a recorded commit by a named author. That makes the writing of the book countable in a way a document circulated by email is not.
One person has written the book so far. That is what an early book looks like — it is written before it is contributed to — and the contributors page, which is the standing record of who has changed what, is where a second name would appear.
One department is running its own edition of the book — the same chapters with its own margin. It is listed on the department editions page.
1 open pull request is waiting on the repository. Pull requests opened by the project’s own automation — the weekly rebuilds of this page and its siblings — are left out of that count; they are housekeeping, not contributions.
Suggested edits
Every page of the book carries a Suggest an edit link. It needs no GitHub account and no knowledge of Git: a reader describes what is wrong and what it should say, and the suggestion is filed as an issue labelled suggested-edit. It is the lightest route into the book, and the one most readers will ever use, so it is worth watching on its own.
No suggestions have come in from readers yet. The route is live, but a reader only uses it once they have read enough to disagree with something — so this figure moving is a better sign of the book being read than any visitor count is.
Where these figures come from: annotation counts from the Hypothes.is API, covering the public layer for the site; everything else from the GitHub API. Visitor numbers are not read programmatically and are linked instead. If any of those calls fails, the rebuild stops and this page is left exactly as it was — it will never quietly report a zero that means “the job broke”.
This page is rebuilt weekly, and is dated by the most recent thing it counts rather than by the day it ran: 20 September 2026.