Annotatable MPs Expenses

This is a list of MPs expense claims published on the parliament.uk site. The PDF documents for the claims can be annotated online collaboratively - using A.nnotate without having to download them to your computer. Two sample pages are shown below - click on the one on the right to view some sample notes on a page. At the bottom of the page is a list of all MPs, with links to all their expense claims.

The page for each MP is a copy of the one on the parliament.uk site, but the links to the PDF documents open online using A.nnotate.
You can highlight a part of a page to add a comment when you find something interesting. Click the image above to view and annotate the page.

To add notes, enter your email in the banner, then highlight a region of the page with the mouse and type your comment. You can also see an index of all annotated documents if you enter your email.

How this list came about

This page was prompted by a Twitter conversation with @paulbradshaw who was asking about ways to mark up thousands of PDF documents online. He wrote a blog entry describing the process; this list was put together in a couple of hours on the same day the PDFs were published, Thur 18th June. It differs from the Guardian's excellent MP expenses crowdsourcing site because A.nnotate allows you to attach comments directly to highlighted regions of a page.

It uses the A.nnotate service (developed by Edinburgh-based web2.0 company Textensor), which allows users to annotate documents online (PDF, MS Office, Images, Web pages) for feedback and reviews, and collaborate in the browser (see a video demo of A.nnotate).

What you can do

Browse to the MP you are interested in using the list below, then click on a particular expenses claim (highlighted with a yellow background) to view it in the browser. If you come across an interesting item on a page, you can draw a rectangle and write a comment, which will be visible to other people browsing to that page. If you see a comment left by someone else, you can click on it to reply. (see the A.nnotate user guide). You can also add tags (like 'moat', 'duck island', 'redacted' etc) to annotations.

Feel free to experiment and add test notes. If you want to add notes, you'll need to enter your email in the banner (this also gives you a free A.nnotate account for uploading and annotating your own documents in private).

What else you can do

Each annotation gets its own URL - this means that you can post a link directly to the note (rather than to the document as a whole) to your own blog, website or Twitter account. E.g. this link takes you directly to a highlighted region of a page of one of Peter Viggers hand written claims. (if anyone finds the Duck Island, let me know - supposedly it's a £1645 pond feature somewhere in the 2006-7 claim, but it might have been blacked out). Click on a note to see its URL in the browser's location bar - or use the link to note arrow icon at the top right of a note to see more options including the built-in Post Annotation to Twitter function.

List of all MPs

You can find out more about the document collaboration service and sign up for a free account on A.nnotate.com.

Please send any comments or suggestions to Fred Howell (email: fred [at] textensor.com ) or to @nnotate on Twitter.