The Annotated Blogger

In which our intrepid hero battles through the linkage to find meaning in life, the universe, and everything.

In keeping a blog, I've come to value links.  Now, I am aware this blog is only two days old, however if you are a proper internet stalker, you'll have noticed that I have been a Blogger member since 2006, meaning I have been linking in blogs since then too.  Where are my other blogs, you may ask?  They're floating out in the blog-o-sphere as remnants of the job I never actually took, because I realized I wanted to be a teacher instead.  That's right-- some of us actually choose to be teachers, because we value the profession, not because we can't do anything else.

The function of a link in blogging is often to provide a point of clarity, to supply deeper understanding or reference to allusions made within the blog.  It is, essentially, annotation to the digital medium.  I like links because I wonder how much my readers pay attention to them-- sometimes I slip in jokes, a tongue and cheek reference that I would not mention otherwise, lest I ruin the flow of my entry.  Yet other times, I have been torn into so many different directions regarding what I wish to say, that I use a link to allow you, the reader, to come to your own decision.  The links are essential to building an understanding of the author.

As a teenager, I would wander through the bookstore and always came across one monster of a book that I coveted: The Annotated Alice (take note, doting admirers, that I still have yet to bless myself with a copy).  I like the irreverence of Wonderland and the annotated version of it provides a whole new understanding of it, entrenching it in historical, political, and social context.  It turns out, the outside world effects how we reflect it in our writing.  In most annotated versions of writing, we provide contextual clues after the passage of time, leaving this to be more speculation than hardened fact.  This is not to say that the pursuit of this is not noble nor necessary, but merely to juxtapose to annotated printed text to the blog-- the printed annotator annotates after the written work is published, but the blogger annotates in real time.

I'm not going to flatter myself into believing that I will be studied in history as a voice to be annotated, but I do think that digital mediums provide a more meaningful and interactive context for said annotations.  As a history teacher, I find annotations to be of critical importance when teaching adolescents how and why we read primary source documents.  They're hard things to grasp, and I have noticed a surprising lack of annotated primary sources to guide my students.  Why not have them make their own?

One of my favorite websites to peruse is SurLaLune Fairy Tales.  Partially, it's because I've always loved fairy tales, but it's also because fairy tales allow us a peek into the cultural and historical context of a group of people.  You want to do a fun critical reading exercise with your students?  Go to your local library (or better yet, have them) and check out as many different versions of Cinderella as you can find, but here's the catch-- they cannot be from our own dominant culture.  Then, have the students read the tale and find the cultural "clues" about what this other culture values about the relationship between caretaker and child, family, beauty, goodness, marriage, wealth, etc.  Then have students compare the common story with each others' notes.  I guarantee, you're not reading the same story anymore.  Instead, we have annotated a fairy tale as a cultural reference.  (Did you look at the link to Cinderella's annotated version on SurLaLune?  It puts a whole new spin on a classic, doesn't it?)

The digital medium provides an orderly and interesting way to create a document that can serve others.  It doesn't have to be a written document either.  Consider the buffalo pelt on display at the Smithsonian's website; this interactive medium allows students to really explore a primary source that is a piece of art, something they would not be permitted to physically handle in a museum, and really explore its meaning.  What if students did the same as an assessment of their mastery of patriotic art, or a political cartoon?  It shows their understanding, and teachers may use it as a future database of examples and resources should anyone need/want to access that information.

Lastly, annotations do not have to be solely for the benefit of non-fiction analysis.  Consider how annotations and links can enhance creativity and storytelling.  What if Rudyard Kipling's "White Man's Burden" was annotated with links that formed a sardonic response, such as a clip to Attenborough's Ghandi?  Does that not demonstrate an understanding according to Bloom's taxonomy by interacting with an original piece and creating something new from it?  What about original work?  When I was studying poetry, I attempted to write a poem that incorporated Spanish and English.  My instructor realized that this would be confusing and offered up the solution of footnotes.  While the poem itself was terrible, for someone who truly values and fusses over the physical appearance of the poem on the page, the footnotes were like a death sentence.  It made the poem look silly, like a note left on the fridge reminding the student to stop by the grocery store and P.S., we need

1) milk

2) eggs

3) your pride and ego on a steaming platter.

In short, it was humiliating.

Instead, consider annotating your own poetry:

A Rat's Prophesy

I was born in the year of the rat,
and I'm a Libran, sign of scalar discord.
My mother's a snake, an Aquarius,
and she doesn't like getting too close to klong jars or other stagnant water.
My father was born a pig, and won't let me eat off his plate, or anyone else's.

I'm doomed to break up with my husband
and will travel near water, around water,
over water, through water, my element.
I'm told my lifeline is exceptionally long.

I have Jupiter on my tongue
and the moon and Mercury in my hands
and Saturn in my heart
and Vaseline on the bottoms of my heels.
But I can make home in a palace or hovel,
I can't stop talking,
I can't make up my mind,
and I carry a stone I found in Mojecar.

I can't stop talking.

I hold my breath through tunnels and I like
holding my father's hand who tells me
I'm a lucky girl.  Lucky girl,
because there's gold in the rivers of Kwai
only I can swallow.

I wrote this poem in high school and stubbornly refused to add footnotes to it, though it meant most of the meaning in it would be lost.  The whole point of the poem is that it's a jumble of superstitions from various cultures but they are meaningful to my reality.  I struggle to explain the Third Culture Kid phenomenon to people, and it's a prominent subject in my own writing.  It's hard to explain in person, let alone through poetry.  By annotating a poem, I feel I came a little closer to explaining myself without giving up the poetic structure of the poem itself, and without unsightly footnote references.  Translated: It allowed me to keep my cultural and experiential background intact without compromising the integrity of the form, and likewise it opened up my poetry for a wider audience who do not share the same background-- they can now appreciate it the same way I do.  If only I could use this to explain my inevitable panic attacks whenever I enter the cereal aisle at a grocery store.

To sum it all up, the links are a powerful tool to be utilized within the digital format, allowing us to explore documents meaningfully, demonstrate understanding of these documents, to create databases that can be accessed by others, to provide alternative responses to documents and ideas, or just to express oneself and be better understood.  Next time you run across a link in a news story, a blog, or on a YouTube video feed, consider clicking it-- it may just transform your interpretation.