Graduate students from our Theories of Literacy course are sharing insights from our weekly sessions in weekly blog posts. They’ll rotate the responsibility throughout the fall 2025 semester, sharing how we’re making sense of the ideas that emerge in our time together.

Let’s talk about texts, baby. Let’s talk about annotate-ting. Let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things that we read. Let’s talk about texts. Alright alright.

Sorry (or you’re welcome?) for the bastardization of Salt-N-Pepa, but this week’s readings and class discussion revolved around: Annotation.

For context, we read two chapters from Remi Kalir’s Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice. In his first chapter “Opening Remarks” he goes over the annotation, annotators, and there many forms: “Annotators are educators who mark papers, programmers who comment within code, data labelers who label data, and researchers who peer review.” The overarching idea here is that most everything we do as readers, and as people, comes as an annotation. That even in conversation we “…highlight ideas, underline details, underscore fine points, or gloss over inconvenient facts” (1). More importantly, that annotation is a social, political and material act that powers memory, justice, and community. He also introduces the reimagining of annotation from being a private or academic practice to something along the lines of civic literacy.

In his fifth chapter “Book Marks” he focuses on books themselves as a sort of heritage site for power, social justice, memory and identity. His primary evidence is based around the book Melissa, formerly published as George by the author Alex Gino, and how the author used #sharpieactivism to correct the misnaming and start a viral trend that enlisted the help of educators, librarians, and fans around the world. He discusses the notion that books are contested artifacts that hold the weight of content but also the symbolic weight of access, classification, circulation, and censorship. Who owns the books, how they are classified, which ones get banned are all annotations.

Effectively, to summarize, “Simply because things have ‘always been this way’ does not mean they are meant to be or that they will be forever” (107).

Both chapters asked readers to reconsider how we see annotations and what we can use annotations for in the larger scope of politics, activism, and power imbalances, but also on the smaller scale as individuals, our views, the conversations we have, and even our material objects such as the books we read. It asked us to find meaning in the annotations we find around us, but then Sel Hartman brought up a good point: is it an annotation if there’s no meaning, or can we have annotations that have superficialness (like doodles in the margins)?

What is an annotation really? What does it have the potential to be? Kalir brings up graffiti as annotation and civic discourse, but some of us wondered can it just be something fun for yourself? What happens when annotation is just personal and not reflective of the larger society, does it still have meaning? Do we have to be aware of the intentionality or the meaning?

I personally enjoy the graffiti down on W. 1st across from the WREC that just says “Frick Cops” because the personal choice not to use “fuck” is reminiscent of a middle-school kid, but like a chill 1312 middle-schooler.

The class discussed what happens when annotation becomes performative. If we are asking people to annotate as an action for civic literacy and discourse, then we must be reminded that it will invite all matters of opinion and even performative action. When something becomes performative it can be marketed, capitalized off of, influenced…is that when it loses meaning?

Or is the meaning in the act of annotating? When we write our names in library cards or textbooks and yearbooks, we can look back at all the people we knew or didn’t know, but shared a small thing in common with in the past. When we see the drawings someone did in a bathroom stall of a bar or even the cave paintings that were left behind thousands of years ago. Maybe annotations are the new wave of heirlooms passed down from generation to generation.

Personally, the question I’m left with is what isn’t an annotation? Every time you change your mind and do something differently is an annotation. You take a different route than normal, you vote for a different candidate, or you try a new product that would be an annotation. If you tell a lie, is that an annotation on the truth? Is death an annotation of life?

Wow so fun and existentialist in a time where everything is SO fun and NOT EVER existentialist.

Safe to say, there is no right answer here. Such as literacy theory, the meaning is in the person and the community they are in, which inevitably weaves out into the larger web of knowledge that we all share.

Jordan Travis is a Graduate candidate in English at Chico State with a focus in literature and creative writing from Oakland, California. Self-proclaimed pop culture aficionado, aspiring Jeopardy contestant, and eldest daughter. Currently working towards becoming a YA fantasy author and MFA.