Another topic that I have had very little knowledge that was highly interesting was that of the topic of social annotation. Annotation is the act of creating a note of information or context on a piece of text or diagram. Kalir’s body of work is most interested in the possibility of creating additional annotations, especially from former readers including information to better understand the information.
He brings up how articles and journals sometimes have text highlighted with extra information contained in them. I agree that annotation can bring up another face to writing, with extra information giving greater context to what is already included. He suggests that social annotation would allow a reader’s peers to give additional insights and observations to a text, and potentially greater value to course material.
Recently, I checked out and read several books from the UViC library. Several of these books carried sometimes very extensive marking in pencil and pen, mainly highlighting text that was of interest to a previous reader. I often found myself wondering what was of great enough interest to highlight in the words and what thoughts they would have in the text.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney