Marginalia: a Reader Responds

We like to think interactive media is a product of our contemporary digital age. But readers, for one, have been interacting with written texts since, well, the advent of written texts. 

It’s called marginalia—personalized notes and comments on a text, often scribbled in the margins of a book. Much as social media has allowed for a cultural back channel—a conversation alongside or behind the scenes of the events of the day—marginalia also has acted as a parallel conversation on a text. And as we begin to ponder the future of books, cultural critics are simultaneously anxious and hopeful about the future of marginalia.

Christine Cupaioulo, writing in the Spotlight on DML blog, notes… In Thinking Outside the Text: Adding and Sharing Notes in the Margins, she…