When I was in high school and later college, choosing which book to take from the pile or buy from the book store was driven by a desire to find the tome with the most marginalia. If reading is the truest form of telepathy, then marginalia is the deepest form of shared thought. I loved seeing what others thought important, cribbing their notes on occasion, and generally feeling like this was not a journey I was taking on my own.
Perhaps one of the most famous examples of marginalia in pop-culture is Severus Snape’s book of Advanced Potion Making from the Harry Potter book The Half-Blood Prince. It’s instructive that this book causes the hero no end of trouble when he used its cribbed knowledge without a full understanding from whence it came.
[Pinterest, Diane Robertsen]
In the present day, so much of our reading is hosted on devices: the web-browser, the smartphone, or discrete platforms like the Kindle. Until this class, I was not much interested in electronic marginalia. What I was aware of was mostly the comments sections of posted content. Rarely do I venture into YouTube comments or Reddit threads, since they are often full of thoughts I would prefer not to share or weighted down by bots writing nonsense.
However, now that I am going down into the proverbial rabbit-hole that is academic writing, the idea of shared electronic marginalia has a real appeal. I very much enjoyed Johanna Drucker’s The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space, in part because they encourage us to “consider extending the ways a book works as we shift into digital instruments” (217). That the book as a physical instrument dominates our conception of what the book-as-data could be rings true to me. Are dynamic websites really books by another name? As Drucker reminds us, “The data file of an electronic document can be continually reconfigured. And an intervening act brings a work into being in each instance, operating on the field of potentialities” (228).
Returning to marginalia, when a group attaches a Hypothis.is reading group to an ePub, do they transform that static content? If the publisher of the ebook updates that site and breaks those notes, is it a form of virtual “book-burning”? What, if any, rights to creators of virtual marginalia have to their copy? Or, is the act of “storing, sorting, summarizing, and selecting” (Blair 85) merely a note-taking function for our consumption and we must mourn the loss, if we even remember it.
For myself, I can see the use of electronic marginalia as very helpful in group work. Writers working together on a piece might find it very helpful to read thoughts from other members of their team. I can certainly see the application in the business world, where marketing and legal might be privy to the work prior to publication. Electronic marginalia offers the promise of a hive-mind.
Works Cited
Blair, Ann. “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission.” Critical Inquiry (2004): 85-107. eJournal. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/427303>.
Drucker, Johanna. “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman. Wiley Online Library, 2013. eBook.
