Book People Archive

Annotations (was Re: Page images of books)

On Mon, Mar 05, 2001 at 10:58:27PM +0100, Jeroen Hellingman wrote:
> ...
> I also want to add personalisation to the books, enabling people to make
> annotations to the text, for their own private use, or for public use, al
> stored on the server. My intention is to encourage people to write notes in
> books, because, unlike in a real library, you can do so without damaging the
> original, and are helpful (Even in paper books, I have sometimes been helped
> by marginal notes made by other readers!). I wonder why more people haven't
> already implemented such features -- it is easy to do, and must be quite
> helpful for readers. [5]

Fascinating idea, annotations.  The New York Times 2001-02-24 had
an interesting story on them.  See

[free registration required]
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/24/arts/24SHEL.html?pagewanted=all
Shelf Life: From the Margins of Literature, Blasphemy Beckons
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
(a review of 'Marginalia' by H. J. Jackson)

(I'll quote more than usual, so that I can add a few 
numbered marginal comments, to the end)
             
> When Coleridge dyspeptically surveyed the paltry literary
> achievements of his brother-in-law, Robert Southey, he
> devised a set of scathing critical annotations to scrawl in
> the margins. An "N," Coleridge explained, means "nonsense."
> "L.M." means "ludicrous metaphor." "I.M." means "incongruous
> metaphor." And "S.E." means "southey's english, i.e. no
> English at all." One can imagine the tiffs that might have
> arisen had Southey decoded Coleridge. [3]
>.... 
> 
> Critics all, but there is a lot more in the margins of books
> than criticism.  Marginalia, says H. J. Jackson, a professor
> of English at the University of Toronto, is one of the great
> unexplored genres of the literary tradition. Her book joins
> "The Footnote" by Anthony Grafton and other recent works on
> the cultural history of books, all of which seem to suggest
> that books have recently come to a turning point; what once
> seemed natural can no longer be taken for granted.
> 
> Marginalia, almost by definition, seem unworthy of this
> attention; they are slight, dispensable, often anonymous,
> too often distracting. Of course, if they happen to be made
> by one literary celebrity in a book by another, for example
> Gibson on Herodotus or Keats on Milton, some attention is
> paid. But otherwise such annotation is now taken as a kind
> of trespass, an inappropriate marring of a book's virgin
> terrain. Virginia Woolf scorned the very idea of marginal
> annotation, imagining aggressive defilers leaving marks on a
> book's flesh.... 
>
> These marks are also made with audiences in mind. Ezra
> Pound, no doubt, was thinking of future readers when he
> wrote in a secondhand copy of Swinburne: "Some damn fool had
> this book before I bought it. I am not responsible for the
> notes in his handwriting." [2] Marginalia create a form of
> extended argument in which the reader has the upper hand,
> taking over the text. But the text also stakes its claims:
> it determines (literally) the boundaries within which a
> reader's reactions are to be constrained.
> 
> In Ms. Jackson's account there are three major periods of
> annotation in Western culture. Before 1700, she suggests,
> annotation was associated with a book's "continued
> possession," not just by the current owner but also perhaps,
> as with some family Bibles, by descendants. Annotations were
> detached observations and scholarly evaluations.
> 
> Then, beginning in the 18th century, as books became more
> common but not yet commonplace, annotations became personal,
> confessional, revelatory. In Hawthorne's [1] "Strange Case of
> Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," for example, one clue to Hyde's
> identity is a "pious work" in Dr. Jekyll's library which is
> annotated with "startling blasphemies."
> 
> Marginalia were also written to be shared; they were forms
> of correspondence. A single volume might be lent to friends
> who would interweave marginal commentary, perhaps even
> leading to courtship. In an unfinished novel by Mary
> Wollstonecraft, a woman is attracted to a fellow inmate in a
> madhouse when she comes upon his annotations of Dryden.
> 
> Coleridge marked the climax and close of this period.
> Friends gave him copies of books to annotate. He introduced
> the word marginalia into English.  His copious commentaries
> have themselves become the subject of scholarly study. [4]
>            
> Beginning in 1820 or so, Ms. Jackson argues, the tide
> shifted again as books found a mass readership. Book sharing
> decreased; annotations became more private. T. H. White, Ms.
> Jackson shows, even carried on a bit of amateur
> psychoanalysis in a volume of Jung. Such private annotations
> are one thing, but if marginalia are found on publicly owned
> books - school textbooks, library copies - they are now seen
> as defacements, private incursions on public space. [6]
>... 

[1] Of course, it should be "Stevenson," not "Hawthorne,"
as author of that story of Dr. Jekyll.  (Such an
error makes one wonder about the other comments by
this reviewer, just as the capability for writing such
disturbing fiction makes one wonder about the sanity
of such peaceful citizens as Stevenson and Hawthorne.)
Writing comments in online books might appear less
antisocial than in printed library books. [6]

[2] I am not responsible for Pound's eccentric comments. 
But following Pound's thought, it is necessary to devise 
a system by which each maker of marginalia is able
to comment on the comments by all others!  Such a
system would certainly need computers.  But one does
agree with the reviewer that decoding Coleridge's 
comments, for example, might not be a good idea [3]
even if a subject for scholarly study. [4]

The next step is to write the specifications for
such software.  Wendy Seltzer at the OpenLaw pages
at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society has
written some free software for annotation of legal
briefs and drafts.  What are the other ideas? [5]

-- 
nom:"Eric"  Eric Eldred  Eldritch Press
mailto:Eldred@[redacted]
vCard3.0:http://www.eldritchpress.org/EricEldred.vcf