Should it?
Entering into an existing document changes it. Do we have the right to do this?
A few years ago that might have been an obvious question. Today, however, with
the growing popularity of wikis, we seem to have forgotten the question of right
or wrong, and instead deal only with the logistics.
People were proposing means of doing this well before wikis, though for some reason
- a reason that probably has something to do with the fact that apparently there
are less people out there who want to do this than I might expect - the various
attempts never seemed to catch on.
One graphic-based tool of long ago (it's probably been defunct for at least five
years) was Expression (their catch phrase was "on top of the web").
This program allowed people to scribble notes, underline text, make comments on
a web page (or a copy of that page) and see their jottings (and those of others
in their community of users) whenever they returned to that page. It was fun.
uTOK offered much the same thing, though it didn't include graphic tools.
I used it extensively, mostly by leaving reminders to myself on web pages I visited,
suggesting to myself how that particular page might be used in an educational
setting. It was still around five years ago
when I praised it, but a bit less than two years after
that I reported that it was no longer available. Both of these tools can no
longer be found on the web (I've got copies on CD, but without the servers that
they went through, these are dysfunctional), though I suppose that there are different
degrees of oblivion.
The Annotation
Master at the Berkman Center of Harvard Law School is still around. In some
ways this is a much more straightforward tool. Essentially it makes a copy of
a web page that gets placed on the Berkman Center's server. That page can be annotated
- we place a footnote at a chosen spot in the text, and a sidebar with the text
of that note appears on the right. In this way readers can both leaves notes to
themselves, and also conduct a conversation that radiates out from the text itself.
It's a rather simple, but very nice tool. And judging from the example that can
presently be found on the Center's server, it's been abandoned long ago and has
become little more than a testing ground where readers comment along the lines
of "way cool". Reminding us that lots of traditional marginalia is also
eminently forgettable.
Go to: Yes, but how?, or
Go to: In the margins of cyberspace.