So in reading “There Are No New Directions in Annotations” by Jason B. Jones, I found that I had mixed feelings in regards to what he was stating about the culture surrounding the annotation process. I felt almost as though he was stating some very obvious parameters around annotating and it was it does for the classroom (focusing mostly on the “Annotating in the Liberal Arts Classroom” section of the text). Annotations were not always a tool accessible to students, but more so high-end scholars who are working towards publication. Similar to how the CUNY Academic Commons was actually software only accessible to faculty and graduate students until the decision was made to open the space up to undergraduate studies. They now make up for a large amount of the 900+ groups on the commons, helping to promote interactive mediums as a tool in all levels of education.

Anyway, Jones goes onto talk about how these mediums open up the potential for bringing our outside materials in order to make connections across other disciplines and perspectives of scholarship. He supports that idea when he writes about how annotations should not be limited to explaining the factual, contextual, or textual conundrums, but can be interpreted as one wishes (Jones). Like previously mentioned, this feels fairly obvious. However, the problem I am thinking about with the idea of annotating and blogging on an online space is with the facilitation of the conversation. Naturally, with the incorporation of one’s thoughts and experiences in correlation with a work, it can either promote some sense of ethos in other participants or quite the opposite. So from an online space, what authority can a teacher or professor express from behind a screen? More often or not, people tend to forget to keep civility in mind when getting into heated debates on the internet. We see it in both academic and non-academic spaces. While you are able to reply to one another, it is in no way the same as fostering a conversation within a classroom. So how do we change that? How can we have online learning spaces that remain open to new ideas whilst still having enough trust that the participants will keep it to a certain degree? It almost feels like an oxymoron. I guess my question is: what is the balance between freedom to say or debate whatever you would like and how should you then keep it within reason? The struggle lies in what something means to each individual, and that’s where the line gets seriously blurry.

Jones also touches on the other end of the spectrum in opposition of open annotation: Wikipedia. Wikipedia is accessible to literally anybody, and anybody can make adjustments. So in a sense, it is open in the same way as an open annotation tool. However, while open annotation tools such as Hypothes.is enforce little to no rules, Wikipedia has incredibly strict guidelines to follow when modifying or creating an article. I am currently enrolled in the ITP Core I course here at The Graduate Center, and this is actually what we’re experimenting with right now. Wikipedia is a tool that can give students the liberty to create something for the public, while simultaneously learning the ins and outs of publishing in a source such as this. When making adjustments, you need to state your case to the previous Wikipedians and have solid evidence. So in a way, its annotation mixed with modification and strict rules. In studying how Wikipedia functions from the inside out, and now having a general understanding of the logistics behind the online encyclopedia, I can’t help but to wonder why there’s still a heavy mistrust in the site (Jones also brings up this question). Wikipedia requires citations from trustworthy sources or else it will be removed from the article. So where lies the problem with it?

All in all, I think there needs to be a happy medium between the two types of tools. With sources like Wikipedia, you get solid, verified information, but no “spunk.” Open annotations offer a sense of freedom of speech and humility almost. However, it leaves the back door open to false information. Both have their drawbacks, of course, most things do. I feel like there should be a cross between both of their goals. Who knows, maybe there already is? Or maybe one in the making.

The fall before last, I took the first section of the ITP Core seminar, and our class also read “As We May Think.” We took turns blogging on the course readings and that week it was one of my classmates, Eileen Clancy’s turn. I was looking back at the course site for other perspectives on Bush’s essay (or anything I’d written about it) and found that her post is quite relevant to what we’ve been discussing in class.  So I thought I’d pass it along.

Memex as Icon

Oh, and there’s this.

Numerous passages in Bauer and Zirker’s “Whipping Boys Explained: Literary Annotation and Digital Humanities” got me thinking about the way text annotations accrete and the implications of an increasingly rich annotation layer for the text it’s attached to–whether a physical book that has passed through many hands, a book or article annotation that cites earlier notes on the same subject, or on a digital annotation platform. At what point in time does the annotation layer merge with the text and exist in tension with it? Or, could an annotation layer at some point rival its object as “primary text”?  Would that depend on a reader’s habits or intentions or is simply it a matter of critical mass? Bauer and Zirker gesture at these questions when they ask “what the idea of a literary text is presupposed by annotation, and how does annotation affect a text, both in its medial forms and as regards its meaning?” (paragraph 6).

As I read through the essay I began thinking about the Talmud. I’m fairly secular and have never studied it, but it offers a fascinating case for considering the implications of annotation over time. A general description of the Talmud’s contents is a “the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis (dating from before the Common Era through to the fifth century) on a variety of subjects, including Halakha (law), Jewish ethics, philosophy, customs, history, lore and many other topics.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud.

Physically, it is a conglomerate, layered text comprising of treatises, interpretations, teachings, commentary, and commentary on commentary relating to Jewish law. But it is not the kind of legal document one would find in a contemporary law library.  Here is an example of a typical page:

Page of the Talmud, diagrammed: 1: Mishnah, oral law codified into “short rulings” cir. 200 AD; 2: Gemara, “a collection of scholarly discussions on Jewish law, 200 to 500 AD, which refer to both the Mishnah and other works including the Torah; 3: Commentaries of Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, 11th Century French scholar); 4: other commentaries dating  from the 10th Century onwards; 5: Page and chapter heading   (from https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24367959)

Therefore, I found Bauer and Zirker’s initial attempt to limit their consideration of annotation to “literary” material a matter of convenience for the sake of their project, but not a fruitful way to think about textual annotation in the terms they set out. (Even they couldn’t sustain it: early in the essay they note that, somehow unlike creative literature, “legal and religious texts are annotated with a view to clarifying meaning and defining their relevance for the lives of people who are affected by them” (paragraph 4). Yet just a few paragraphs later they cite biblical glossing and annotation as “an enrichment of the reading process” (paragraph 11) and “based on an idea of who and what the reader is” (paragraph 10). The motivations for and implications of annotation really hold for all texts.  And the Talmud is an exceptionally rich subject for consideration in this regard, with “all the imperfections, the trivialities, the multiplicity of voices, the wild associations – everything that characterizes human conversation.”

Although it took many centuries to develop into its current form, it is not even a document frozen in time; a new edition is underway with additional, recent contributions. A comprehensive digital edition was recently launched, as “the Talmud is peculiarly suited to a digital treatment.” Mayer Pasternak, director of the project, elaborates on this:

”It’s a web of interconnected ideas and thoughts and commentaries.  In one place something might be very poorly elaborated and you’ll find in another place in the Talmud it’s discussed at length – there’s a constant cross-referencing process.” So if you’re itching to read the Talmud on your commute, there’s an app for that, with hundreds of thousands of hyperlinked sources and annotations.

This is one text that cannot exist apart from the multi-level, multi-layered annotations that accrued throughout centuries of use in numerous locations; the annotations, and its ongoing centrality in Jewish thought, debate, and practice, are what create and sustain the text as a living document. Like Bauer and Zirker’s ideal annotation platform, it is a remarkable “model of collaboration” among author, annotator, and reader over time.

What all the authors whose works we read for this session share, is that they understand annotation (Jones, 2014), note-taking (Blair, 2004) and computing—or maybe better put: “memexing” (Bush, 1945) as based on and serving human interaction and communication, and therefore as not a merely individual undertaking, but one leading to a spread of knowledge, thoughts and/or their preservation, not only for oneself, but also for others.

Whereas Blair focuses on notes as a means to either intently or involuntary store knowledge, Jones describes a use of annotation very close to the ideal of ours’ in the virtual extension of our classroom by using hypothes.is—as a means to gain a “better understanding [of] a text through others’ experience” and knowledge, and as a space of discussion. And also Bush, even though he mainly focuses more on the technological specifics of the machines he imagines, mainly sees the memex as a tool to navigate through “the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things”, to keep track of chosen ones and share them with others, at any point in time. One of the liveliest anecdotes in his essay is his description of two friends meeting and discussing the advantages of a Turkish over a European bow resulting in one of them passing the other one a reproduction of what he had collected about this subject years ago in his memex. (The anecdote, strongly reminding of the uncountable links we send each other today, is also part of this video that show how the memex could look like and operate.)

Bush’s essay was remarkable to me concerning at least two aspects. First, I found that his astonishingly accurate predictions of the prospective technological developments are a good starting point to reflect upon the technologies we use in our everyday life today. His detailed descriptions of the machines he imagines provoke comparisons to computers, algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning. And by drawing those comparisons, by imagining a computer and checking which aspects of Bush’s prediction are accurate, I think about what a computer, the machine I use daily but nearly never explicitly reflect upon, actually is and does. The effect reading this text had on me was similar to what I experienced when I first read Adam Greenfields 5-pages long description of a smartphone in his book Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (Verso, 2017). It starts as follows:

“Though its precise dimensions may vary with fashion, a smartphone is fundamentally a sandwich of aluminosilicate glass, polycarbonate and aluminum sized to sit comfortably in the adult hand, and to be operated, if need be, with the thumb only. This requirement constrains the device to a fairly narrow range of shapes and sizes; almost every smartphone on the market at present is a blunt slab, a chamfered or rounded rectangle between eleven and fourteen centimeters tall, and some six to seven wide. These compact dimensions permit the device to live comfortably on or close to the body, which means it will only rarely be misplaced or forgotten, and this in turn is key to its ability to function as a proxy for personal identity, presence and location. (…)”

I still find this passage not only a fascinating with regard to the fact that people who might read this book in a post-smartphone era (or at least one in which smartphones function significantly differently) will actually need this description. But it also shows how I would actually not even rudimentarily be able to describe a smartphone, the thing that is with me all day, in detail. This again is very telling about the degree to which I have already accepted the existence and functionality of my technological environment as a sort of “second nature”.

Second, while I was unsuccessfully searching online for an interview with Vannevar Bush (who died in 1974) in which he reflects upon his predictions in the decades following its publication—I found out about his involvement in the Manhattan Project. This was a powerful reminder that technological advancement is never neutral and can’t, not even on a theoretical level, be separated from its (possible) applications. I think that a discussion about the text can only gain from being informed about his engagements within the development and testing of atomic weapons. Passages like the last paragraph in which Bush claims that “he” [referring to “man”] “may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome” become even more urgent to discuss, and telling about the discourse at the time in which it was written, in the light of this knowledge.

I find my thoughts on this week’s readings shaped by two mental “commonplace” notes. One is I. A. Richard’s quip, “A book is a machine to think with.” The other recalls an experience at the Morgan Library: upon presenting a series of medieval manuscripts, a curator mentioned that textual margins developed in order for readers to turn a page without smudging ink. After note-taking became common, scribes began playing with margins and spacing to facilitate the study (e.g. wider spaces between characters in reading primers so students could practice).

Taking these notes as “epitomes” for the readings, one can attempt to crystallize a few simple truths regarding note-taking. Beginning with Richard’s comment, we understand that the act of reading requires, much speech, structuring one’s thoughts to comprehend the meaning the creator intended to convey. Such is the rationale for why one may reread a sentence; the issue is less a failure to understand the individual words used in an utterance and more the personal attempt to develop a receptive thought structure. Viewed under this concept, Blair’s “adversaria” become quite transparent and familiar in their utility: they’re simply notes to guide our thinking towards a mental structure that aids comprehension, a warm-up for our ‘cramped’ brains prior to the Barthesian game of reading. Hence the merit of other writer’s notes; they present an avenue of thought or “experience” (Jones) that may assist understanding a writer’s intended meaning.

Indeed, this view also explains the merits of note production in general and classroom phenomena like, “…students in the same class in Paris [coming] away with full-text notes from a course on geography, identical but for aural mistakes…” (Blair) As much as the act of reading requires a structuring of thought, so does the writing act itself. The production of even scribbles requires a (via Whitehead and James) “violence” of thought that steals language away from the associations of thought in the mind. In the act of writing these notes, the students experience the frame of thought conductive to this stream of language. Even if they fail to return to these notes, they still possess the experience of structuring their thoughts in such a manner, should they be required to do so again.

Yet, while this frame of thought explains the “adversaira” it fails to address the “commonplace” and other aspects of note-taking. While the act of writing itself may facilitate thought, it appears wasteful for such mental tools such as “Intermediate notes and drafts” to be discarded and “never meant to be kept.” (Blair 95) Nor does it approach the rationale for note-taking to move “toward the diary based on personal experience,” (Ibid 102) and dismiss the narrowing of thought that notes of “epitome” provide. In fact, reliance on experience suggests undermining the utility already mentioned as the “violence” to produce language entails complete separation from the myriad of thoughts that birthed the utterance. To rely upon experience in one’s notes casts a shadow of impossible recapitulation with the factors producing an utterance; one knows while reading that the full mental structure is irredeemable. (Perhaps this is why Jones held himself from embracing the “full understanding” of Bush and Engelbart and his desire to subsume their thoughts as “dramatize[ation].”)

Hence the provision of the latter note. In it, one sees a cycle of writing to reading to writing. The sheer pragmatic need to engage with a text provided literal space for the reader to write, regardless of the work. Even with the production of manuscripts designed for the act of note-taking, the original feature of margins remained universal. Or, to be pithy, “For as long as there has been writing, there have been readers who follow along and ‘write back.’” (Jones), regardless of the need for understanding. Rather than seeing notes as a “transmission of knowledge” (Blair 85), it seems more appropriate to see note-taking as a product of another fundamental aspect of language: conversation. Within these margins, the reader does not seek to solely provide means to understand the text; s/he seeks to answer to the text and, in turn, be understood as well.

Soothsaying is a risky business. Often, visions of the future expose the limits of the prognosticator rather than the possibilities of invention. Remember Octave Uzanne’s 1894 The End of Books? He muses, “Who might tell us, in effect, what will be the state of Bibliophilia in the year 2000? Will the art of typographic impression still exist at that date, and will the phonograph…not definitively replace printed paper and illustration with some advantage?”¹ Even giving science a century of growth, Uzanne still imagines the phonograph as a key player.

Johanna Drucker speaks to why so many futurists miss the mark: they base their vision on the current forms of technology rather than on performative functions. Of electronic texts, she laments, “The icon of the ‘book’ that throws its shadow over the production of new electronic instruments is a grotesquely distorted and reductive idea of the codex as a material object.”² She urges a refocusing on the “program” of the material book—what books allow readers to do—explaining that “if we shift our approach we can begin to abstract that functional activity from the familiar iconic presentation.”³

Sixty years before Drucker and a year before the realization of ENIAC (the first computer), Vannevar Bush then is dazzlingly prescient. He shrewdly bases his predictions squarely on the program of scientific thinking rather than its forms. He considers the history of what scholars do—taking field notes, recording data, analyzing, consulting previous works, writing, and publishing—and considers how new scientific tools such as photocells and thermionic tubes might transform, rather than replicate, those processes. In doing so, he predicts the future of technology with powerful accuracy.

The list of devices he imagines with precision is astonishing, from computer components such as monitors, RAM, and CPUs, to branded products such as iPhones and GoPros (walnut-sized, head-mounted cameras). He anticipates a coding language with dichotomous branches and Boolean logic to facilitate the compression of published texts and a means to search them. More broadly, he also imagines the credit card, point-of-sales software, and even Siri and Alexa who he says will “certainly beat the usual file clerk.” Understatement indeed.

His visionary piece de resistance, however, is the memex—a hyperlinked, albeit local, internet. The memex enhances the program of intellectual discovery: the human brain’s capacity for associative indexing “whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another.” Calling to mind Seth Lerer’s historical reference to the Sammelband, Bush depicts such indexing “as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book.” But, outstripping the material confines of the Sammelband, the mimex “is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.”

In addition to the worth these associations have for the creator of them, “the inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.” Bush believes that the associative indexing itself, in addition to the discovery it yields, is valuable. (And as I copied and pasted that quotation from Bush’s archived Atlantic article into my own notes, having just searched my Word doc for the Sammelband reference, I was struck by how Bush, 75 years ago, was describing my experience in 2018.)

He extrapolates the uses of the mimex to a range of occupations, from the legal to the medical, as well as to unimagined ones. He believes there will be “a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record”—the passion of us Digital Humanists who, just this week, have been establishing such useful trails to and from Benito Cereno.

And, like many prophets of ancient literature, Bush is also, in a sense, surprisingly blind. Despite his enormous capacity for predicting the future of technology, he glaringly misses the future of society.

Appearing only twice in his detailed vision, women exist merely as technological courtesans. He describes a stenotype in the 1940s as if the operator were a prostitute on opium: “A girl strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze.” Imagining computers in the future, he writes, “Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls…” While he wasn’t far off his near future, as ENIAC was originally programmed by a team of women, his anthropomorphic description here is more reminiscent of Sardanapalus in his bedroom than a machine in a lab. The omission of women is striking given female scientists such as Edith Clarke at GE, where Bush had worked a decade earlier, who published celebrated papers about Bush’s invention of the differential analyzer well in advance of his writing this article.

Bush’s view is also surprisingly limited in scope. He envisions assistive technologies such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and audio, but, unlike his predecessor Edison, he doesn’t imagine what those affordances can do for the disabled. He eagerly awaits freedom for the mathematician so lofty that he cannot compute numbers himself, but he doesn’t extend the liberating capacity to those more visibly impaired or to academics weeded out early in their educations precisely because they couldn’t do elementary math.

He’s also missed the humanities, relegating photography to data gathering and never once mentioning, even in his litanies of professions, the realm of literature, despite his admonition that “specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.” While he sees the capacity for the technology to connect material, he has missed its perhaps more important ability to connect people to each other.

While unbound in his scientific imagination, he remains a prisoner of his social one: his world of the future is that of continued isolated and individual achievement by members of an elite that is distinctively male and abled and presumably white and well off. And yet, he has impressively envisioned the very tools that now invite much of the world to contribute, collectively and from myriad walks of life, to the “general body of the common record.”

¹Rubery, “Canned Literature,” 238-239.
²Drucker, “Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-Space,” 220.
³Ibid.

As for some of us, annotating From Work to Text by Roland Barthes was my first experience with online annotations. I usually am a very active annotating reader; the pages and margins of most of my books and printed texts are full of notes, underlinings and arrows. My experience of using hypothes.is was therefore strongly framed by a comparison between my analogue annotation practices and this new experience.

First of all, obviously, the main difference is that this time I was annotating in a semi-public sphere, and in dialogue with others. I could see what Schacht describes as the pedagogical effect of digital annotations as highlighting “what democratic deliberation shares with academic discourse: the general form of conversation.” (paragraph 8) It was this aspect that I valued the most within using hypothes.is. I definitely felt less alone in encountering this very dense and in parts (to me) enigmatic essay, to see that others had already encountered similar difficulties, asked themselves and via their annotations us, their colleagues, similar questions. As multiple people had already read and annotated the text before I did, I felt like I would join a conversation that was already taking place. (I would therefore be interested in the experience of the first and second person reading/annotating.)

Furthermore, hypothes.is is encouraging the dialogical aspects of its application by sending e-mail notifications as soon as someone replies to your annotation. I could not withstand going back to the text and read the replies immediately each time I received one of these notifications, sometimes leaving a reply to a reply. Therefore, using this form of annotation definitely made me engage with Barthes’s essay more intensively than I would have otherwise. I doubt that I would have re-read certain passages that many times if it was not for the sake of being curious about these replies to my annotations and my desire to reply to them in turn.

At the same time, my reaction to these replies also made me aware of hypothes.is as being a form of “surveillance” of my studying practices. Hypothes.is documents the time someone makes an annotation or writes a reply. And so there was this one time, when I read the e-mail notification in the middle of the night, and I was wondering what “the others” and “the teacher” might think of and know about my lifestyle if they see that I am still awake, and still engaging in coursework. I know this might sound a little paranoid, but while I was reacting to this reply around 1.30am, I did so with a feeling of slight discomfort. I thought about what if I would have made all of my annotations between 2 and 4am in the night before class, or an hour before class? And what if I would do this with every assignment? Would it influence my colleagues’ and teachers opinion about me? I guess it might sound exaggerated to think so much about these questions in connection to this class and this one assignment, but I think that the publicity and kind of information collected within forms of digital expression is something we should always keep in mind.

The aspect of these annotations to be (semi-)public also was relevant in terms of the content of my comments. What I was writing was definitely different from what I would have written in the margins of a print version of this text no one else would see. I didn’t write down what I figured would be not interesting or relevant for other readers, or too private for me to share it. I therefore liked the idea of an option for private note-taking, which Bauer/Zirker refer to as a “useful provocation to explore the countervailing values of openness and privacy in the classroom, on the Web, and in democracy generally.”

As Bauer/Zirker have also pointed out, “annotation (…) provides readers with an interpretation not of a complete text but of its particular aspects.” This was definitely helpful given the complexity of From Work to Text. It felt liberating to be able to react only to the parts I could best connect to, or the parts that immediately arose questions. I didn’t feel the pressure of having to “understand everything” before I would have the “right to” say something about the essay, a dynamic that is often prevalent in academic contexts. At the same time, doing so made me think about “the selection of which aspects of a text are to be annotated and the relation of the parts of a text to its whole.” (Bauer/Zirker) What happens with our reading of a text, if we are not forced/encouraged to react to a text as a whole? On the one hand, I definitely felt more comfortable in the first place with skipping over the parts I could not make sense of immediately, whereas at the same time as soon as someone else had commented on one of these passages, I—depending on the content of the annotation—engaged with them more than I would have if they were “plain text”. I therefore think that social annotation practices benefit incredibly from a diverse readership sharing their annotations, and would therefore argue that in this sense hypothes.is encourages a conversation between a non-homogenous group of readers (see Bauer/Zirker’s statement that readerships become more diverse in the digital realm).

Last but not least, I appreciated Bauer/Zirker’s development of different categories/levels of annotations, “which takes into account the risk of the loss of information through the overabundance of information”. While doing the annotations in hypothes.is, I missed my different-colored pencils and my personal system of abbreviations (which I use similar to hashtags), which allow me to immediately see the difference between an added definition of a word, a question, a note on what I need to look up later, a comment on the content, the style etc. On the other hand, this would of course require a group of readers to compromise on a common use of categories which would in turn restrict and determine the ways in which we annotate once again, and therefore speak against the “openness” digital annotations want to provide.