The past and futures of annotation: How reading communities drive media change

This article takes a comparative look at the annotative models and devices that readers have used historically to organize the information in texts, in order to better understand the needs that readers bring to the digital environment. Based on what we can discover about the factors that brought about major changes in models and devices of note-taking in the past, what can we learn – as we design new forms of note-taking and annotation for the digital age – about the approaches to design that seem likely to have the most lasting impact? As this tour d’horizon shows, even in the gadget-driven digital environment, social activity plays a determining role in shaping the forms that annotation tools adopt and even the definition of what a reader is and needs.