Skip to main content
Annotation
The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series
Welcome to the open review site for Annotation, a book in The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. We appreciate your interest in this open peer review process and we hope you’ll add thoughts, questions, and suggestions - yes, annotation - to the draft of our manuscript. You may contribute to the open review throughout the summer of 2019. The review period will close on Friday, August 23, 2019, at which point all commentary will be archived.
Why open up the peer review of Annotation? To walk the talk. If you create a PubPub account and write a single comment about this draft manuscript, then you have added a note to a text. You’ve authored an annotation. You’ve helped make reading visible and thinking collaborative for the purposes of knowledge production. It would be a bit odd if we were to write about how annotation is powering advances in open scholarship and then not participate in a similar process. Moreover, annotation is an everyday activity, something practiced by journalists, scientists, academics, learners of all ages, and professionals of all stripes. We hope to improve our writing, address our blind spots, and correct any shortcomings by welcoming divergent viewpoints from people who, as our peers, can capably and usefully review Annotation.
We have written Annotation for an interdisciplinary audience and a general readership. Annotation is many things to many people, to many texts, and to many periods of time. We have written a book that is approachable, conversational, and - we hope - informative for the scholar, the student, and the curious bibliophile. We welcome to this open review specialists across academic fields who are already familiar with their particular annotation technologies or practices; please read Annotation in order to perceive this genre from another perspective, and do share with us any methods, insights, or advances that should definitely be mentioned. We also welcome to this open review any enthusiastic reader who customarily jots marginalia in their favorite novel; we hope you come to appreciate the diversity of annotation across cultures and contexts, and please share with us your musings, memories, and recommendations.
To those who annotate Annotation during the summer of 2019, please know that it is only because of incisive and honest feedback previously elicited from colleagues, friends, and anonymous reviewers that made it possible for us to share this full manuscript with you. We welcome your thoughtful commentary and, further, we commit to read and learn from your contributions (and from another group of anonymous reviewers who are reading the manuscript, too). If it’s useful, please refer to the following Annotation Guidelines. You’re also very welcome to email either Remi or Antero with your review should you prefer not to post publicly on this site.
Thanks again for participating in this open review, we’re eager to read the notes you add to this text. We appreciate you writing annotation so that we can better write Annotation.
Remi Kalir, Assistant Professor, University of Colorado Denver
Antero Garcia, Assistant Professor, Stanford University
You likely read, and perhaps also write, annotation every day. Annotation influences how we interact with texts across everyday contexts. Annotation provides information, shares commentary, sparks conversation, expresses power, and aids learning. This is why annotation matters.
Annotation is an informative literary practice. Glosses, rubrics, scholia, and labels provide information about the reader and the reader’s private or social reading practices, about the text, and about relevant scholarly, interest-driven, professional, and political contexts.
Annotation can share commentary. While the relationship between annotation and comment is not one of strict equivalence, we examine annotation sharing commentary in the context of religious texts, social media hashtags, the evaluation of chess games, and fact-checking journalism.
Annotation can be written, shared, and read to converse with an audience. We survey examples of “curated conversation” to discuss how annotation sparks, and also sustains, conversation that is authored publicly, discussed and debated openly, and recursively rewritten by many.
Annotation expresses power. Connecting historical uses of annotation with contemporary and viral art, we look at how annotation elevates counternarratives as well as silences dissenting voice. Looking across contexts, we consider who gets to annotate and under what circumstances.
We are interested in how annotation aids learning. But how so? Under what conditions? And for whom? Education researchers have studied annotation for decades and have found some strategies, technologies, and arrangements to be effective for both students and their teachers.
We examine the future of annotation amidst ongoing social, scientific, and technological change. This book has discussed historic and contemporary relationships among annotation and information, commentary, conversation, power, and learning. We now consider an annotated future.
