Antero Garcia

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.

Authors' conversation annotating readers' annotations on their book about annotation: #AnnoConvo