By Lily Díaz & Ling Chen
April, 2015
I
The annotation exists in a different time scale from that one of the book. What is the time scale of the book that marks its difference as an imaginative artifact in its own right. Imaginative artifacts are as “autonomous worlds” in which rules and conventions do not apply and which influence the way we see the world (Wartosfky, 206). The time scale of the book both antecedes and begins with its author. In matter and spirit, the book was always there. Through the author, the book found its first metrics: A table of contents, and an introduction, with chapters, pages that follow one another and in the end, a colophon. If the book is a good one, it exceeds its author. It acquires a life of its own.
In comparison to the book, the annotation has a micro time scale. It is the flash of insight that combines different domains of knowledge, or the quick recollection of the past, or simply a recognition of a distinction embedded in the peculiar detail that prompts its author into the act of writing. So at least initially, the distinction is one of magnitude, but not of poverty.
The annotation’s time scale intersects with that of the book, the map, or any other system that it marks with additional frameworks it brings along: The song that I heard last night, the newspaper I read this morning, the exhibition space I might navigate tomorrow.
II
Annotations are examples of associative thinking, the mental process of making associations between a given subject and all pertinent present factors without drawing on past experience (McGraw-Hill). Free, wandering thoughts search and find their point of focus in places and beings other than themselves. They are the results of collective thinking – either by an individual accumulatively overtime, or by individuals collectively based on influence and coordinated activity rather than similarity (Allwood). Annotations then come in serving as bridges and joints between resources, explanations or comments and the subject.
The Memex Concept, introduced during the 1930s by the famous American engineer, inventor and science administrator Vannevar Bush, is one noteworthy example of associative thinking. The memex, a hypothetical adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of hypertext, was further specified and envisioned in his contribution to the 1945 The Atlantic Journal, titled “As We May Think.” In this scenario, he expressed his concerns towards the direction of then contemporary scientists were leading during wartime. He imagined or rather wished for a time when progresses were made in technologies to allow and encourage more and eventually full accessibility of the constantly growing knowledge.
Figures 1 and 2: Illustration of Memex, a portmanteau of “memory” and “index”.
Bush explicitly described how the memex should work based on the ready technical and economic support and foreseeable predictions of plausible advances in the near future. As shown in Figure 1, memex, is an extensive human memory, where “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified” (Bush), as the author pictured, would be the solution to retain human memory and knowledge as a race and species rather than individuals. Our contemporary practice of bookmarking, with the resulting bookmark stacks neatly organized thematically into folders, is an example of annotations created using this type of associative thinking.
Another example of associative thinking that makes use of annotation is mind maps, or diagrams used to visually organize (or structure) information by linking together different chunks of information. As can be seen in Raymond Lull’s Tree of Knowledge shown in Figure 2, the use of these visual devices to organize and illustrate information can be traced back centuries. In our contemporary era however, the use of mind maps was first popularized by British television personality and popular psychology author Tony Buzan.
Mind maps and concept maps are examples of hierarchies or patterns of organization in which general concepts are arranged at the top with more specific concepts subsumed below. Hierarchies depict inductive thinking. This is the type of pondering that starts from observations of details and proceeds to characterization of the general. They are also used as part of deductive thinking, the kind of ruminations that proceed from general knowledge and seek to make predictions.
Figure 3 and 4: The “Tree of Knowledge,” by Raymond Llull is an ancient example of hierarchical knowledge organization. In the figure above there are 16 subjects, each with its own trunk, branches and leaves (Wikimedia). Born in the island of Majorca, Spain in 1315, Llull is considered by some to be the founding father of information science (Wikipedia).
Besides hierarchies, networks are another structure type used to represent semantic relations between concepts. The form of a network is either a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices symbolizing concepts and edges (Sowa), however, whichever way it is, networks always triumph to reveal underlying dependencies between pairing entities. In contrast to hierarchies, networks are decentralized and considered more flexible. They are in sight plainer, though in fact can be used to organize much more complex relations.
Networks can be used to indicate connectivity and define relations. We can think of them as the threads that can be used to bring objects together into patterns into rich and meaningful tapestries that can then be regarded with the senses.
Representation is an embodied phenomenon so all visualizations, including annotation are examples of semantic landscapes that humans create and navigate through their interaction in and with the world. From the contemporary information-oriented paradigm, Life itself is a process of whereby the organism exists ecologically and in symbiotic interaction and in equilibrium with other organisms.
III
The time scale of the annotation is contingent. Unlike the book that stands by itself, the annotation either follows, or anticipates. And it is others who always justify the annotation’s existence. Therefore it could be argued that, as tools of anticipation, annotations also serve us as future-oriented devices. The annotation of today is displayed as blank little spaces constructed through the use of colorful paper blocks, waiting to be filled with insight. They exist at the margin that limits the page, in the inside cover of the book, within our Reading List on the browser as the first greeting, or as the last reminder.
Sources
Allwood, Jens. 1997. “Dialogue as Collective Thinking.” In P. Pylkkänen, P. Pylkkö, and A. Hautamäki, A. Eds., Brain, Mind and Physics. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
“Associative thinking”. 2003. McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms. The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Accessed on 14.04.2015, http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/associative+thinking.
Bush, Vannevar. 1945. “As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly, 176 (1): 101-108.
Sowa, John F. 2006. “Semantic networks.” In Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Accessed on 20.04.2015, http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/semnet.htm.
Wartofsky, Marx. 1979. “Perception, Representation, and the Forms of Action: Towards an Historical Epistemology.” In Models: Representation in Scientific Understanding, Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co.
Yates, Frances. 1966, 1999. Selected Works, London and New York: Routledge.