Annotation and the marginalia of everyday life

Annotation of Everyday life

James StewartUniversity of Edinburgh

Marginali

a? The world,Our lives?

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Maybe add a picture here, don’t really like blank sides

• “Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.”

Gossip

What is the Value of these new text forms?

• Value to whom, why, how long for etc• Value in creation, value in reading, value in aggregation?

Mutual shaping of media,

formats and forms:

• New media technologies – paper, sound recording, telegraph etc

• New formats: newspaper, book, television channel etc

• New forms of expression: the novel, the sitcom, the jingle, the album, the collection of poetry….

time space cost and control

Social Learning in Innovation

• The media support does not predetermine the form of expression or its use.

• New forms and formats based on existing and new ones created.

• Social processes and individual invention shape emergence of new media, forms and formats

• We are in a period of rapid change (still), with constantly changing and emerging practices.

New texts

1. Standardised, formalised, machine records2. Freeform: SMS, emails, bulletin posts, comment

posts, Blog posts, web pages, twitter posts, twitter feeds, infinite hypertext documents, Google search results, wiki texts, Online chats, Facebook status updates, tags…

Hard to untangle the formats and the forms – constantly changing.

Huge popularity of short texts – these texts are pervading our lives.

Appropriation and innovation

• Professionals, industry and government– The usual suspects and some new ones.– ‘content’

• People in their everyday lives.• Massification of text production: We are all able to create.

– Reading new texts– Writing new texts– Practices of TEXT

Practices of text• Communication with others– 1, 2, multi-way, broadcast– Information exchange, broadcast, rhetoric,

‘stroking’…– Life performed in ‘realtime’ though electronic

communications• Interpretation– Making sense of the world and one’s place in it.

• Memory– Practices of recording and remembering– Diaries, logs, minutes, photos, search logs– Why record, how we use.

Memory Spaces

Practices of Text

Communication

Communication

InterpretationInterpretation MemoryMemoryExpressionExpression

Power

Old texts to new

Brands to Tags

Linking the ‘virtual’ and the real

The tag

Tag - sign, brand, logo, link, classifier, badge, mark, stamp, touch, seal, signifier, instruction, command, call to action, identifier, ticket, rule etc etc

Tags and Tagging• Form: E.g.

– Label– Markup– Sign

• Formal and Informal

• What does a tag do?– Classify– Mark ownership– Mark track – memory– Gives instructions, directions (to

use)– Link – etc etc

• Trad: tagging controlled.• Now: Anyone can tag, anything

can be a tag, anything can be tagged– Creation of tag spaces, tag

communities etc– Emergent, folksonomy, context

dependent, ambiguous– Electronic, multiple media

• Electronic Tag systems can be used to explore, search and recombine texts, spaces, communities etc using software tools

• Need some more focused idea…

Annotation and Margin NotesA Type of Tagging– Formal : markup, classification– Informal

• Short, Ambiguous, Context dependent,

1. Everyday commenting (oral) interpretive, communicative

2. Textual, Critical, interpretive tagging• Margin Notes < Marginalia,– Personal Memory and Interpretive work– Used ‘going along’ and for later access and commentary.– A richer, more personal, contingent practice than simple

tagging. (possibly)• Now shared, linked, communicative– Twitters, status updates, youtube comments, comments

on online journals etc etc

IssuesAmbiguity: the good and the bad

Decontextualised – but also deeply contextualised

Short text – infinite text

Multi-voice, but few dialogues

Infinitely recombinable, and lacking internal structure

Marginalia of everyday life: How are they valuable and

where are these texts going?

How do we use them: why do we create and read them?

How might we use them in the future: memory work

What can we learn from them as academics?

What concepts, tools form the humanities can be applied to these new corpori of text? And v.v.

Can we get scholars to share annotations?

Inter-disciplinary