The literature review is one of the core components of the scholarly lifecycle. To begin your research, you see what has been said and done. Life being short, you want to start by learning what the cleverest people have thought or are thinking about it. While AI tools are being thrown at the problem using algorithms to improve the finding of relevant content (I wrote about the BIMS service recently, just to take one example), far less work has been done to collect what other humans have thought about that content. I can’t help feeling this is an area where humanities could provide some ideas to scientists.
Finding out what academics thought about content
In the humanities, comments have been shared ever since the first annotated edition: probably the earliest annotated editions were religious texts, such as The Geneva Bible, 1560. The technique was reused subsequently for secular texts. It is difficult to imagine anyone reading Shakespeare or Dante today without using an annotated edition to explain unusual words, but also to learn about different interpretations of a text – in other words, the scholarly debate.
This scholarly discussion can be seen at the chalk-face, as it were, in marginalia. Years ago, as a new undergraduate discovering books in the university library for the first time, I noticed that some of the books had notes scribbled in the margins – or, to be more precise, notes on the endpapers linked to passages in the text. At the time I was horrified, but I later discovered that these books were part of the collection of Peter Ure, professor of English during the 1960s, whose books were donated after his death to the University Library. His disagreements with authors was a fascinating discovery: that the printed word might not be sacrosanct. I didn’t realise at the time how momentous that discovery was, but today I notice that the new interest among proponents of Open Science is motivated by a similar desire: to bring discussions about texts into the open. The marginalia (for this is what the notes by Ure were) represent a dialogue, and we all agree that scholarship should be such a dialogue.
Types of marginalia
Of course, the simplest form of marginalia is to underline the text. This technique is visible in thousands of discarded textbooks from students having completed their course, and is endorsed in blogs for readers such as Modern Mrs Darcy, but I’m not sure if the act of underlining really helped with learning. In acknowledgement of the ubiquity of underlining, Amazon Kindle provides an underlining feature, and even more tantalizing, offers to show you sentences and passages that have frequently been underlined by others. Tantalizing, because at a stroke this extends the solitary act of reading to a communal activity. Did others find that sentence memorable as well?
Clive James used his own marginalia as the basis for his book Cultural Amnesia, a miscellany of his own humanities reading from the last two hundred years or so. That is indeed one use for marginalia: if you can’t find a single home for all the points you have discovered, then you can always create a new bucket, starting from the notes, and hope there will be some links. James, as an experienced journalist and author, shaped his reading into a kind of coherent argument. His reading, at least on the basis of this books, is nowhere near as miscellaneous as Montaigne, who James states was his inspiration for this technique.
Making marginalia visible
If you scribble notes in the margin while you read, nobody is going to see what you have written – not even you, if you subsequently lose the book. Your thoughts risk being unnoticed. One solution to this is to attempt to transcribe all the annotations and publish the results. This was done by the author of a book on marginalia, entitled unsurprisingly Marginalia, by H J Jackson. He should know about the subject, having edited three of the six volumes of the marginalia of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
There is no question that Jackson’s book establishes the value of marginalia to other readers, but it does not offer a scalable solution: “The first step surely has to be to bring more marginalia to light” [Afterword]. True, but at what cost? Jackson’s book is firmly based in the print humanities. There is no mention any of the annotation tools available today (see below). Instead, it advocates writing in the margins of print books, with then a tiny handful of those books being digitized and the annotations made available – hardly a scalable solution. As the author states, only a few thousand books with marginalia have been (or ever will be) edited or scanned and made available.
How to make marginalia mainstream
If scholarship progresses by debate and disagreement, then marginalia should be central to all scholarly reading, including scientific text. Marginalia, after all, represent the human in the loop. The question is how to get the comments visible to others. Kindle has the technology but chooses not to implement it; Open peer review is one, rather formal, way of sharing comments, but it is a very cumbersome technique for making detailed comments on individual sentences: you want to see the comment alongside the text. There are apps that enable comments to be shared, probably the best-known of which is hypothes.is, described as “annotate with anyone, anywhere), but this tool appears to have focused mainly on integration with LMSs, so that students on a course can share comments with each other. What is needed is some way to share comments with others, perhaps being able to limit the comments to other readers you choose to share with. I’d like to know just what an individual scientist made of a text I am currently reading.
I notice that annotated editions of science classics are rare indeed. There is an annotated edition of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (by James Costa, 2009), although it is available only in print:
My hope for the future is that one of the available digital tools already on the market could provide cheap annotations from individual authors for readers to share, not just in the humanities, but across the board. Why not read a book with a Nobel prize-winner and read their responses?
Leave a Reply