Annotation as Passage : SxSW insights

A huge gain for my practice coming out of sxsw will be incorporating annotation into how I engage the web.  While Reframe It provides the means, it’s important to delve into the gains that are awaiting if the practice becomes embedded into engagement.

Many of us know the use of a bright yellow highlighter only from studying to pass an exam.  At that level the superficial goal of finding the essential information for the test guides one’s choices.  Highlight to memorize, at least until the exam is over.  That is not annotation.

To annotate is to capture your thoughts about what you are reading as you are reading it.  Many authors found great use in this practice.  Ideas spawn ideas, or as the alchemical maxim of correspondence goes, “like to like.”  Marginalia in author’s libraries often contain the seeds of their own work.  In those scribbles and jottings we glimpse where the reading mind fired in recognition.

Annotation locates where an idea enters the reading mind’s grasp.  Annotation marks where one makes the work one’s own.  Annotation is the ideas passage.

(thanks to Mary-Frances for pushing me into this recognition…)