2008-11-10

The Golden Machete

From The Chronicle's "Wired Campus" there comes word of an interesting online collaboration. A collective of writers and critics, all women, are "close reading" Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. I rather like the Lessing that I've read -- The Fifth Child, at the urging of my girlfriend -- but this is interesting in that it confirms a suspicion of mine. A few years ago, I was working on an online annotation project, but the focus was on scientific texts. The idea was that collaboration through annotation would help peers bring each other up to speed on a particular topic. Here, the annotations are hung on a decidedly literary text, and the purpose is not so much asymmetric knowledge transfer, but facilitation of discussion around a group.

Notably, the text is chosen and the group brought together by an outside party. But I am glad that this approach to annotation (pseudo-marginalia?) is showing potential in the humanities.