![]() ![]() Maybe a particular paragraph resonated with them or a poem made them wistful, and they took the time to write down their responses in the margins of their book. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that it would be quite enjoyable to come across a previous reader’s notes in second-hand or borrowed books. I didn’t want to deface them, as I saw it. So much for electronic annotations what about annotations in good-old made-from-a-dead-tree books? For the longest time, I felt a certain aversion to writing anything more than my name and the date of acquisition in my physical books. Anyone who comes across can leave their notes for me or other readers to peruse. ![]() I also link to my research presentations (which are all HTML files hosted on GitHub) through Hypothesis’s via. We have built-in support for Hypothesis on apostilb, and we encourage readers to leave their notes on our articles. The glosses left by monks have revealed a trove of historical knowledge and interpretation for modern researchers, and we like to think that apostilb provides “marginal illuminations on science” in a similar vein. Later, when we named our little research-summaries website ‘ apostilb’, Amanda Alvarez and I drew inspiration from the medieval practice: our apostilb gets its name from both apostil, another name for marginalia, and apostilb, an old unit of luminance. The concept fascinated me, and when I came across Hypothesis I began to use it to annotate the PDFs in my Zotero library (using Firefox as my default PDF reader). ![]() It started when I was reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, in which the medieval monks left marginalia in the books they painstakingly copied for the library in their abbey. ![]()
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