One cannot praise enough the MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge series, which offers “accessible, concise, beautifully produced pocket-size books on topics of current interest.” Annotation is an outstanding example of the relevance of this type of publication, which helps in understanding the hidden mechanisms and larger cultural stakes of ubiquitous but often unnoticed concepts, actions, objects, ideas, and technologies, and, above all, the links between all these elements.
The authors of this book start by making a sharp distinction between annotations as concrete marks made by users and annotation as a genre. Given the relative wealth of material already available on specific types of annotations (Kalir and Garcia pay thus a well-deserved tribute to, for instance, H.J. Jackson’s Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books [Yale Univ. Press, 2001]), it is the latter that is here at the heart of the analysis, conceptually as well as functionally. The authors first explain annotation by...