Annotation

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

Welcome to the open review site for Annotation, a book in The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. We appreciate your interest in this open peer review process and we hope you’ll add thoughts, questions, and suggestions - yes, annotation - to the draft of our manuscript. You may contribute to the open review throughout the summer of 2019. The review period will close on Friday, August 23, 2019, at which point all commentary will be archived.

Why open up the peer review of Annotation? To walk the talk. If you create a PubPub account and write a single comment about this draft manuscript, then you have added a note to a text. You’ve authored an annotation. You’ve helped make reading visible and thinking collaborative for the purposes of knowledge production. It would be a bit odd if we were to write about how annotation is powering advances in open scholarship and then not participate in a similar process. Moreover, annotation is an everyday activity, something practiced by journalists, scientists, academics, learners of all ages, and professionals of all stripes. We hope to improve our writing, address our blind spots, and correct any shortcomings by welcoming divergent viewpoints from people who, as our peers, can capably and usefully review Annotation.

We have written Annotation for an interdisciplinary audience and a general readership. Annotation is many things to many people, to many texts, and to many periods of time. We have written a book that is approachable, conversational, and - we hope - informative for the scholar, the student, and the curious bibliophile. We welcome to this open review specialists across academic fields who are already familiar with their particular annotation technologies or practices; please read Annotation in order to perceive this genre from another perspective, and do share with us any methods, insights, or advances that should definitely be mentioned. We also welcome to this open review any enthusiastic reader who customarily jots marginalia in their favorite novel; we hope you come to appreciate the diversity of annotation across cultures and contexts, and please share with us your musings, memories, and recommendations.

To those who annotate Annotation during the summer of 2019, please know that it is only because of incisive and honest feedback previously elicited from colleagues, friends, and anonymous reviewers that made it possible for us to share this full manuscript with you. We welcome your thoughtful commentary and, further, we commit to read and learn from your contributions (and from another group of anonymous reviewers who are reading the manuscript, too). If it’s useful, please refer to the following Annotation Guidelines. You’re also very welcome to email either Remi or Antero with your review should you prefer not to post publicly on this site.

Thanks again for participating in this open review, we’re eager to read the notes you add to this text. We appreciate you writing annotation so that we can better write Annotation.

Remi Kalir, Assistant Professor, University of Colorado Denver

Antero Garcia, Assistant Professor, Stanford University