Coding for the Many, Transforming Knowledge for All: Annotating Digital Documents

Abstract

Annotation—“A Note Added to Anything Written, By Way of Explanation or Comment”—Is Almost as Old as Writing Itself (“annotation”). Among the first texts to be written down, Homer's oral poems survive thanks first to Hellenistic scholars, whose comments and explanations formed the editions that came down to us, and second to later manuscript technology, which enabled the painstaking copying of both the texts and the notes associated with them (see fig. 1). At the I Annotate 2019 conference, Gardner Campbell reflected on the meaning of to note and identified as its essence the idea of signing: “A sign that we formulate, a sign that we leave, a sign that points to something, points to a meaning, points to another word, but also points to the pointer. We leave signs; we leave signs; I annotate. The agency in the word note is extraordinary” (00:07:35-58). To note is, as Campbell's keynote put it, a fundamental act of attention, of sharing, as basic as “water” or “love” (00:06:16-00:07:25). To note is an essential human act.