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.
To write this post without at least a dozen footnotes would feel like a disservice[1]. In its fullest embodiment, this featured curation would be a multimedia mess of marginalia[2]: post-its, doodles, stickers, highlights, GIFs, and probably even audio clips of our raucous sidetrackings in class. As a paper, it’d be riddled with QR codes, and as a digital artifact, it’d be scribbled-over in MS paint.
Annotations change depending on the context, and in this case, my annotational abilities are constrained by the nature of a publishable website page… meaning I can’t expect Kim to fiddle with HTML or Javascript[3] to accommodate the ramblings and sidebars. She’s already doing enough with hosting our class readings on Perusall, free of charge, where we can drop memes, inside jokes, song references, intertextual connections, gut reactions, definitional work, and even the occasional trauma dump on a particular vulnerable literacy reading[4].
To engage with the reading on my own is enriching, but to share annotations in a community of learning is enlightening. We live out just a portion of the nearly boundless ways of annotating while we discuss the range itself. For starters, Remi Kalir’s work on annotating in Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice posits that annotation is the embodiment of the joy of reading, but we raised a handful of complications that, in the end, only further fortified Kalir’s point. Though an annotation may not be born from joy, it is inarguably the embodiment of the act of reading, the physical manifestation of our inclination to process a text as we alter it in our processing. We further act as evidence for Kalir’s idea that annotation is a social verb in the way we create environments of shared reference, direct mentioning, and interaction with each others’ ideas.
Take “text” and “reading” in a wider lens, following Kalir, and allow yourself to consider all forms that a text can take: billboards, bodies, billiard tables, bins in your garage, baby clothes[5]. Kalir defines annotation as, simply, “a note added to a text.” Hailey raised the question of whether the annotation has to be contained *within* the text itself, to which we wagered no, due to the nature of an annotated bibliography. A quote tweet[6] is an annotation of its own just as much as a tab in a textbook. Graffiti on a government building is a public act of engagement, if not civic commentary (Kalir).
Annotation (in a traditional sense of notes on the page) may not always be accessible for a number of reasons: ownership/financial availability, lack of tools/medium, or uncertainty on how to “best” annotate are just a few of these roadblocks, lending to a larger criticism of the frameworks that prevent annotation. Books, when regarded as sacred or immutable objects[7] on a physical level, are afforded a material agency that then trumps the reader’s agency in annotating the text. Kim herself, in class, admitted that she often gets only a few paragraphs into any given book before she’s reaching for her pencil to make some kind of note. Unconsciously, I’ve adopted this practice from graduate school myself. What if I only rented my textbooks for my wallet’s sake? Sure, I annotate exclusively in pencil, but I wouldn’t have the time to clear my notes with an eraser before Chegg is threatening my loved ones to get the Norton Anthology back in pristine condition[8].
From that example, imagine a world in which a market of textbook exchanges allowed students to not spend several hundred dollars per semester on tomes critical to their field[9]. Imagine, further, the value embedded in those books if the notes from prior students could be included. The minute weight of ink or graphite on the page may not change the heft of the book, but merely leaving that knowledge accessible for the next student to peruse its pages compounds its value[10] and makes it a weighty resource. What do the traces of prior students’ educations leave us to unearth and infer about the students themselves?
This raises the idea of annotations being shared, public, and communal— in the words of Kalir, “a collective act and accomplishment.”
Questions abound, then, of who is making the annotations, who is allowed to witness them, and even allows us to consider trends that might arise among annotations. Muir National Monument just a few hours from us exemplifies the capacity of annotation for public good, and as our classmate Michelle says,
The decision to retain an annotated sign rather than producing a new sign is significant. A replacement would not call attention to the fraught history or to the steps taken in the pursuit of justice, and the changes might then be taken for granted or forgotten entirely. Also, I imagine a new sign would present all information in a uniform design, whereas the annotated version elevates the additions rather than making them equal to the existing timeline.
Another prime and nuanced example of annotation’s social agency/ability is explored in Chapter 5 of Re/Marks on Power, which is titled “Book Marks” and focuses on the case of Alex Gino’s novel Melissa’s Story. Though Gino initially named the book after the titular trans character’s deadname, they soon began working to rectify it via #SharpieActivism: a movement encouraging librarians and anyone else with a copy of the book to change the cover by “defacing” it. As a matter of fact, the term “defacing” itself brings a self-aware tension to the perception of annotation as disrespectful by some. Reader, you likely understand the value of annotation as a literacy practice, so I will not waste our time here and instead include a comment from our colleague Lourdes at the end of Kalir’s chapter.
Can you construct a scenario in which an annotation devalues or extracts meaning from the text it is enacted upon? In quite literally any case, I can only imagine a deepening of a text’s rhetorical situation and impact regardless of the annotation itself; whatever is written is inherently adding to the meaning of the text because there must be some sort of relationship between the annotator and the text, the annotation and the annotator. Blood-red paint strewn on a statue of a colonizer is a radical form of annotation many have referred to as “defacing”[11] Even scribbling “STUPID!” or a hate symbol across a message of racial peace and unity enhances the force of the initial message and highlights the exigence for its existence[12]. A smiley face, check mark, or strikethrough on a graded paper are annotations with their own weighty ability to alter meaning and perception of the student’s work.
YOU GOT A SOURCE FOR THAT?
Citations and corrections are a sort of annotation, too, as evidenced in Twitter’s[13] Community Notes feature and Bradley’s astute gif addition in our Perusall. We annotate in parentheticals— especially the neurodivergent among us, who rabbit hole into tangents and digressions like margin-scrawlings before drawing ourselves back to the primary body of the text: our conversation. Kalir points out that even meme vernacular references the act of annotation, demystifying the act and threading it into our daily language and humor.
At this point, in all of the ways humans love to leave their presence, their voice, it’s harder to conjure up a concrete list of any places or texts[14] upon which we can imagine no feasible, meaningful annotation possibilities. Tree trunks, a half-eaten and sauced-up hotdog, a gentrified building, a child’s bicycle, a keypad. Annotations abound: septum piercings, yearbooks, my late mother’s collegiate doodles, my partner’s little nick of a scar below her neck from her long-gone cat, the Lascaux Cave Paintings. And all of the little sticky notes in the books held close to our chests. We love to remark, to mark again, to make our meanings known.
Sel Hartman is a Masters student in English at California State University, Chico with a keen interest in cultural rhetorics, digital humanities, and literacy education but rarely the time to dive into these subjects with the vigor they’d prefer. Between classes and office hours, you can find Sel working at a grocery store, playing with their calico kitten, or daydreaming about maps and travel. Sel hopes to spend the rest of their life learning and yapping, but one day with a PhD to sound fancier.
[1] So, footnote I will.
[2] I do truly hope alliteration doesn’t bother you. There’s more coming.
[3] God forbid
[4] “particularly vulnerable literacy reading” is such a grad student thing to say, I don’t even know where to begin.
[5] Remember what I said about alliteration?
[6] Can I even technically call it a quote tweet now? Quote-post? It has so much less grace to it, I fear.
[7] Or, perhaps, the infallible word of God
[8] For legal purposes, Chegg Incorporated has never placed any threats on mine or my loved ones’ wellbeing.
[9] I might really be asking you to stretch the limits of your whimsy, here. I know. It’s pretty darn hard to imagine a mutually beneficial, well-organized, and functional system of knowledge access that doesn’t produce monetary gain in our capitalist hellscape.
[10] Exponentially, in my opinion.
[11] https://hyperallergic.com/569756/confederate–monuments–removed/ A liberal-leaning perspective from 2020 & a more conservative or centrist approach published in 2015 (with the comments serving as their own sort of annotations) https://cwmemory.com/2015/06/25/why–it–is–still–wrong–to–vandalize–confederate–monuments/
[12] BOO! Assonance! I bet you thought you were safe.
[13] Please don’t make me call it X. I’m so sorry.
[14] Or people, or posts, or histories, or life forms, or— Things.