Foundational papers

If you are new to annotation, Wolfe and Neuwirth's The Future of Annotation: from the margins to the center, is a good place to start. Although it was published 20 years ago, it's still relevant today and prophetic in some ways.

Why is it important?

• discusses how annotation has been central to knowledge sharing throughout history
• reviews very early technologies for annotating digital documents, decades prior to hypothes.is and Perusall
• prompts us to consider how an author could benefit from annotations made by readers
• it predicted:
  “as more and more readers take advantage of new annotation tools, they will be leaving tangible traces of their mental activities as they interpret, analyze, and critique texts. Many of these annotations will be housed in public (or semipublic) databases where they can be accessed and shared by subsequent readers of a text.”

The next key work is Annotation by Kalir and Garcia, published in 2021

Why is it important?

Provides comprehensive consideration of what annotation is, and what annotation can do (.....provide information, share commentary, express power, spark conversation, and aid learning)

A draft copy of this book was posted online in 2019 and received annotations by multiple scholars. Those annotations prompt further consideration of the topics discussed, and add great value -- not only for the authors, but also for the readers.

To see the final published book, go to the MIT Press site

Or see the draft version with numerous annotations pictured below......

Last, but not least, is the earliest published paper on Perusall. It comes out of Eric Mazur's group at Harvard. You might already recognize the name, as Eric has made seminal contributions to the Peer Instruction field.

Why is it important?

It demonstrates that collaborative annotation can provide a stimulus for reading uptake. 90–95% of students completed all but a few of the reading assignments before class if using Perusall, and also performed better on an exam than those students who took the same class without using Perusall.