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silveradept[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
Today's question is fromazurelunatic, and is a fine example of how one word can spawn a thousand more.
Marginalia are often incredibly important to students. The barebones article at The Other Wiki on the subject suggests that students scour the used textbook sales for books that have been well-annotated and highlighted by their previous owners, such that the student purchasing the used textbook ends up with a ghost tutor of sorts, in the form of the student who went before and has left their understanding and thinking on the pages of the text. Marginalia turns out to be crucial in the plot that carries the title of Harry Potter's sixth-year adventure, as Harry, who is terrible at the alchemical sciences, discovers a well-annotated and marginalia-full copy of the official Potions textbook that makes several suggestions that are either counterintuitive or flatly contradict the official text in the making of substances. By taking the annotations seriously and following their advice, Harry is able to produce much higher-quality work than usual, to the suspicion of the instructor. The attributed name of the author of the marginalia is "The Half-Blood Prince," which, in typical Potter fashion, requires a certain amount of lateral thinking to fully understand, as Prince, in this case, is not a title but a surname that belonged to a student in a previous generation, and so "half-blood" refers to their wizarding purity status, rather than their royal blood status.
And, frankly, while JK Rowling is forever in the sin bin for being vocally a TERF, the school and world she created lives on apart from her…with a few modifications and annotations, of course. The fanworks community is one of the most visible creators of annotations, marginalia, lacunae, formulae, illumination, and otherwise taking the text and transforming it, interpreting it, pointing things out, suggesting new theories and models, or applying a retrospective lens to show how well (or poorly) any work or element has aged and how well it can be adapted to new environments and situations. Six million annotations by three million registered users on the Archive of Our Own alone says there's always a vibrant community around anything, putting their opinions in the margins and otherwise trying to influence and interpret things for themselves. It seems slightly demeaning to say that fic authors are almost always the margins and rarely the text, but, at least according to publishers and the copyright law, that's always the case, even if the quality of the fic can far outstrip the original. And, of course, many people who are fic authors are also creators of their own universes that are published or shown on screen, or people who are published and shown on screen (sometimes as if it were shame, sometimes very proudly) also contribute to their own fannish communities, although usually, creators start contributing after their creation is finished without change of return, because it becomes a tricky thing to untangle whose ideas are being copied and people are litigious about those kinds of things. And, of course, there are those who believe quite firmly that there should never be any annotation or marginalia at all about their works, that they are perfect in all of their ways and particulars, and anyone who conceives of things differently is simply wrong. And that pursue litigation based on this idea as well. Or that they want to control what kinds of marginalia are placed around their works. And while time has proven that one cannot dam the river of fandom in the Internet Age, where six new works appear somewhere for every one that gets hammered, it wasn't always that easy to find the annotations.
Something I am entirely interested in, now that we have established the idea that books in electronic form are definitely a thing, is how the practice of marginalia might expand significantly with regard to the actual books themselves in their electronic form. In print copies, of course, the marginalia is limited solely to whichever copy has been drawn in, highlighted, and commented upon. Unless that copy is then shown to someone else, they don't know about the marginalia present. With electronic books, it seems entirely more possible for each person to provide their own annotations and to share them with others. In fact, the very nature of hypertext encourages this kind of practice! The anchor tag is equally capable of referencing things on the same page as it is referencing things on other pages, so long as the place to be referenced has a unique name that can be pointed at, and ebooks are essentially hypertext with specific kinds of wrappings around them so that they can be understood and navigated by devices that speak the protocol. (As someone who had to put together an EPUB by hand according to the spec, it's a pain in the ass, but it's entirely doable for someone who has the requisite coding knowledge or can look up the things to be done. And, hopefully since the last time I've had to deal with it, EPUB understands images better than it did, because that would make things so much easier for everyone.) Aggregating annotations across users and owners of a particular book is the sort of thing that Amazon wants to do, and is probably already in the process of doing, but I would like that to be available to everyone who has a copy of a book, and not just because Amazaon is a corporation that should have long been sent before an antitrust tribunal and or taxed to the point where after a certain amount of income, all of its income was confiscated so that the money could be distributed back to the people. Although, if the disaster of deleting notes and annotations along with copies of 1984 that hadn't been authorized is how they look at it, then annotations and marginalia are still being tied to specific copies of the work, rather than being available in a more global account form, such that any copy of 1984 could presumably collect the annotations that someone has made on any other copy of it, regardless of publisher or pagination. I suspect there are factors that I'm not considering or limitations that would make it impractical to do this (or, as a cursory search suggests, there is DRM that might actively impede it), but it seems like the sort of thing where a person could, presumably, separate and package their annotations and marginalia in such a way that any person who has a copy of the source in a compatible form will be able to download and add the annotation to their own work.
In a perfect world that isn't constrained by DMCA 1201 that tells us it's a crime to try and circumvent DRM in any way at all, unless the Librarian of Congress has exempted a process or an idea (like right to repair) from enforcement of DMCA 1201, we would be able to do neat and interesting things where a package deal of neat things could be done together. Say, for example, someone (like me) wanted to have a copy of a movie where one of the audio tracks is the comedic commentary from RiffTrax, possibly with subtitles as well. In a non-1201 world, what could happen is that the Rifftrax folks could purchase a legal copy of the movie in question, load it into a muxer program, add the additional track to the program, then remux the entire thing together so that Rifftrax was an audio language (and possibly subtitle) option. If they were feeling fancy, and this was a copy of the movie that was going to be on a disc, they could add Rifftrax as a menu option and possibly even record some commentary over things like the anti-piracy messages and/or warnings, or change some of the startup movies to something more of their liking. And then they could sell this Rifftrax-enabled item. Possibly even in a just-in-time method, such that they only ever purchased a copy of the movie when someone specifically said they wanted, and then subsequently paid for, a Rifftrax'd version of it. Because they could essentially apply First Sale Doctrine to the movie that they purchased legally and then do what they want with it. But because we're in a world where content is no longer sold, but merely licensed, instead, the Rifftraxers can sell their content, but you have to put the things together yourself, either by playing the movie with the original track muted or turned down and the Rifftrax coming from another source, or you have to break DMCA 1201 yourself (and probably violate at least one EULA in the process in addition) and remux the whole thing into a new file on your own time and computing power. Similarly, in a non-1201 world (or any other world where the copyright laws work sensibly instead of solely for the benefit of large corporations and occasionally people who can catch them doing something blatantly illegal enough to get a judge to side with them), someone could make ebooks with their annotations and marginalia built in! Get the textbook with student-curated links to videos and webpages that help explain things more or are file locations for open lectures on the subject, or the one where the instructor for the course is linking to the same. Make a special edition of a canon book where a bunch of fanworkers have made recommendations for good fanfic right in the text itself (having gotten any applicable permissions to have links to the works included, if there are applicable permissions needed to link to the work, as opposed to excerpting it). Or someone could build a series concordance right into the books of the series themselves, so that when there's a plot thread that's been backgrounded and then springs back as the surprise right before the end, someone can put in a note saying "Yeah, we last saw this character on page 235, so they've been busy as fuck doing something else for the last three hundred pages if they're going to reappear here." or other such bits that will help a person remember where and when they saw something last. And these things would all be predicated, essentially, on making sure that the person offering these enhanced versions of works have legally purchased sufficient copies of the original to then repackage with their own editions. Or they could just offer the additions for a lower price or give them away for free for people who already have the book or want to import the additions into their own versions. There's a tremendous amount of untapped creativity and "value-added" that could be applied to works still in copyright that's being stymied because publishing houses and publishers (and possibly, some authors and creators as well, let's be fair) don't want it to happen. Of course, the public domain has been starved of content for so long as well, with things that should have long since been put in being extended yet again every time Disney notices that the Mouse is up for a copyright expiration. If copyright were functioning as a limited monopoly, like it's supposed to, there would be a lot of material to be creative with that wouldn't violate the law, and there might be people who have cool stuff but are willing to wait the however many years it takes for that item to make it to the public domain.
So yeah, drawing or writing in the margins. It's a cool thing to observe, there are a lot of things that it can do, and we should all be able to do it a lot more than we actually are able to do, especially electronically, because of some fundamentally broken parts of the copyright law and an unwillingness from lawmakers to force content created digitally or on digital media to follow the same rules as were established for print media that have worked pretty well.
Oh, and also, if you go looking at many examples of illumination and art in the books that these concepts are applied to, regarding the monks and the scriptoria and the eras when books are very valuable objects, you're going to see a lot of butts, breasts, and penises. because that's what was being drawn quite a bit of the time. There were a lot of people with knowledge of the time period making Python (Monty) Ltd. films, and that knowledge comes through in the film. A lot. Even if all the nudity in the film is limited to the animated segments. So expect a significant amount of nudity, violence, and sex in the artwork, the illumination, and the marginalia. In case that's a thing you need to be warned for.
Today's question is from
azurelunatic, and is a fine example of how one word can spawn a thousand more.Marginalia?Doodling in the margins! One fo my favorite things to see done in materials that aren't part of the library's collection. Officially-sanctioned marginalia are often illumination, and frankly, if you're a monk in the scriptorium charged with copying books repeatedly, it's probably best to have an outlet for the creative urges that are going to eventually want to come out during all of that copying. (Of course, at that time, books are sacred and valuable objects that need to be chained to their shelves, so there's also a certain amount of making them beautiful and ornate so the value of both text and pictures is apparent to the reader.)
Marginalia are often incredibly important to students. The barebones article at The Other Wiki on the subject suggests that students scour the used textbook sales for books that have been well-annotated and highlighted by their previous owners, such that the student purchasing the used textbook ends up with a ghost tutor of sorts, in the form of the student who went before and has left their understanding and thinking on the pages of the text. Marginalia turns out to be crucial in the plot that carries the title of Harry Potter's sixth-year adventure, as Harry, who is terrible at the alchemical sciences, discovers a well-annotated and marginalia-full copy of the official Potions textbook that makes several suggestions that are either counterintuitive or flatly contradict the official text in the making of substances. By taking the annotations seriously and following their advice, Harry is able to produce much higher-quality work than usual, to the suspicion of the instructor. The attributed name of the author of the marginalia is "The Half-Blood Prince," which, in typical Potter fashion, requires a certain amount of lateral thinking to fully understand, as Prince, in this case, is not a title but a surname that belonged to a student in a previous generation, and so "half-blood" refers to their wizarding purity status, rather than their royal blood status.
And, frankly, while JK Rowling is forever in the sin bin for being vocally a TERF, the school and world she created lives on apart from her…with a few modifications and annotations, of course. The fanworks community is one of the most visible creators of annotations, marginalia, lacunae, formulae, illumination, and otherwise taking the text and transforming it, interpreting it, pointing things out, suggesting new theories and models, or applying a retrospective lens to show how well (or poorly) any work or element has aged and how well it can be adapted to new environments and situations. Six million annotations by three million registered users on the Archive of Our Own alone says there's always a vibrant community around anything, putting their opinions in the margins and otherwise trying to influence and interpret things for themselves. It seems slightly demeaning to say that fic authors are almost always the margins and rarely the text, but, at least according to publishers and the copyright law, that's always the case, even if the quality of the fic can far outstrip the original. And, of course, many people who are fic authors are also creators of their own universes that are published or shown on screen, or people who are published and shown on screen (sometimes as if it were shame, sometimes very proudly) also contribute to their own fannish communities, although usually, creators start contributing after their creation is finished without change of return, because it becomes a tricky thing to untangle whose ideas are being copied and people are litigious about those kinds of things. And, of course, there are those who believe quite firmly that there should never be any annotation or marginalia at all about their works, that they are perfect in all of their ways and particulars, and anyone who conceives of things differently is simply wrong. And that pursue litigation based on this idea as well. Or that they want to control what kinds of marginalia are placed around their works. And while time has proven that one cannot dam the river of fandom in the Internet Age, where six new works appear somewhere for every one that gets hammered, it wasn't always that easy to find the annotations.
Something I am entirely interested in, now that we have established the idea that books in electronic form are definitely a thing, is how the practice of marginalia might expand significantly with regard to the actual books themselves in their electronic form. In print copies, of course, the marginalia is limited solely to whichever copy has been drawn in, highlighted, and commented upon. Unless that copy is then shown to someone else, they don't know about the marginalia present. With electronic books, it seems entirely more possible for each person to provide their own annotations and to share them with others. In fact, the very nature of hypertext encourages this kind of practice! The anchor tag is equally capable of referencing things on the same page as it is referencing things on other pages, so long as the place to be referenced has a unique name that can be pointed at, and ebooks are essentially hypertext with specific kinds of wrappings around them so that they can be understood and navigated by devices that speak the protocol. (As someone who had to put together an EPUB by hand according to the spec, it's a pain in the ass, but it's entirely doable for someone who has the requisite coding knowledge or can look up the things to be done. And, hopefully since the last time I've had to deal with it, EPUB understands images better than it did, because that would make things so much easier for everyone.) Aggregating annotations across users and owners of a particular book is the sort of thing that Amazon wants to do, and is probably already in the process of doing, but I would like that to be available to everyone who has a copy of a book, and not just because Amazaon is a corporation that should have long been sent before an antitrust tribunal and or taxed to the point where after a certain amount of income, all of its income was confiscated so that the money could be distributed back to the people. Although, if the disaster of deleting notes and annotations along with copies of 1984 that hadn't been authorized is how they look at it, then annotations and marginalia are still being tied to specific copies of the work, rather than being available in a more global account form, such that any copy of 1984 could presumably collect the annotations that someone has made on any other copy of it, regardless of publisher or pagination. I suspect there are factors that I'm not considering or limitations that would make it impractical to do this (or, as a cursory search suggests, there is DRM that might actively impede it), but it seems like the sort of thing where a person could, presumably, separate and package their annotations and marginalia in such a way that any person who has a copy of the source in a compatible form will be able to download and add the annotation to their own work.
In a perfect world that isn't constrained by DMCA 1201 that tells us it's a crime to try and circumvent DRM in any way at all, unless the Librarian of Congress has exempted a process or an idea (like right to repair) from enforcement of DMCA 1201, we would be able to do neat and interesting things where a package deal of neat things could be done together. Say, for example, someone (like me) wanted to have a copy of a movie where one of the audio tracks is the comedic commentary from RiffTrax, possibly with subtitles as well. In a non-1201 world, what could happen is that the Rifftrax folks could purchase a legal copy of the movie in question, load it into a muxer program, add the additional track to the program, then remux the entire thing together so that Rifftrax was an audio language (and possibly subtitle) option. If they were feeling fancy, and this was a copy of the movie that was going to be on a disc, they could add Rifftrax as a menu option and possibly even record some commentary over things like the anti-piracy messages and/or warnings, or change some of the startup movies to something more of their liking. And then they could sell this Rifftrax-enabled item. Possibly even in a just-in-time method, such that they only ever purchased a copy of the movie when someone specifically said they wanted, and then subsequently paid for, a Rifftrax'd version of it. Because they could essentially apply First Sale Doctrine to the movie that they purchased legally and then do what they want with it. But because we're in a world where content is no longer sold, but merely licensed, instead, the Rifftraxers can sell their content, but you have to put the things together yourself, either by playing the movie with the original track muted or turned down and the Rifftrax coming from another source, or you have to break DMCA 1201 yourself (and probably violate at least one EULA in the process in addition) and remux the whole thing into a new file on your own time and computing power. Similarly, in a non-1201 world (or any other world where the copyright laws work sensibly instead of solely for the benefit of large corporations and occasionally people who can catch them doing something blatantly illegal enough to get a judge to side with them), someone could make ebooks with their annotations and marginalia built in! Get the textbook with student-curated links to videos and webpages that help explain things more or are file locations for open lectures on the subject, or the one where the instructor for the course is linking to the same. Make a special edition of a canon book where a bunch of fanworkers have made recommendations for good fanfic right in the text itself (having gotten any applicable permissions to have links to the works included, if there are applicable permissions needed to link to the work, as opposed to excerpting it). Or someone could build a series concordance right into the books of the series themselves, so that when there's a plot thread that's been backgrounded and then springs back as the surprise right before the end, someone can put in a note saying "Yeah, we last saw this character on page 235, so they've been busy as fuck doing something else for the last three hundred pages if they're going to reappear here." or other such bits that will help a person remember where and when they saw something last. And these things would all be predicated, essentially, on making sure that the person offering these enhanced versions of works have legally purchased sufficient copies of the original to then repackage with their own editions. Or they could just offer the additions for a lower price or give them away for free for people who already have the book or want to import the additions into their own versions. There's a tremendous amount of untapped creativity and "value-added" that could be applied to works still in copyright that's being stymied because publishing houses and publishers (and possibly, some authors and creators as well, let's be fair) don't want it to happen. Of course, the public domain has been starved of content for so long as well, with things that should have long since been put in being extended yet again every time Disney notices that the Mouse is up for a copyright expiration. If copyright were functioning as a limited monopoly, like it's supposed to, there would be a lot of material to be creative with that wouldn't violate the law, and there might be people who have cool stuff but are willing to wait the however many years it takes for that item to make it to the public domain.
So yeah, drawing or writing in the margins. It's a cool thing to observe, there are a lot of things that it can do, and we should all be able to do it a lot more than we actually are able to do, especially electronically, because of some fundamentally broken parts of the copyright law and an unwillingness from lawmakers to force content created digitally or on digital media to follow the same rules as were established for print media that have worked pretty well.
Oh, and also, if you go looking at many examples of illumination and art in the books that these concepts are applied to, regarding the monks and the scriptoria and the eras when books are very valuable objects, you're going to see a lot of butts, breasts, and penises. because that's what was being drawn quite a bit of the time. There were a lot of people with knowledge of the time period making Python (Monty) Ltd. films, and that knowledge comes through in the film. A lot. Even if all the nudity in the film is limited to the animated segments. So expect a significant amount of nudity, violence, and sex in the artwork, the illumination, and the marginalia. In case that's a thing you need to be warned for.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-16 06:17 am (UTC)