 Greetings everyone and welcome to day four of Iannotate 2021. I'm really happy to have you all here today. Welcome to our fourth keynote that we'll start in just a second. As you probably all know now and you can tell if you can see the words on the screen. I'm Nate Angel from Hypothesis. I want to actually get to the main business of this morning, which is this keynote that we've been long, long anticipated. And that is with Rémy Collier and Antero Garcia. And I'm not going to say a lot about them because I think many of you already know who they are and they're going to say a little bit about themselves, I think by way of an introduction. But I will just say that it is through the work of these two fellows that I think has really changed the conversation around annotation in general through the publication of this book and all the other work that they do that they're going to talk about today and that book is called Annotation. And I was just looking, I have my copy sitting right here and now it's gone. But I'm sure they'll show it off to you later. And so without further ado, I'm going to pass the baton over to Rémy who's going to get things started and I will back out of the way and let them speak for themselves. Rémy, take it away. Hey, thank you so much, Nate. And thank you so much to everybody at Hypothesis for organizing Iannotate. Ontario, my dear friend, how are you? I'm good. Hey, Rémy, how are you? So I just gave Ontario a pop quiz a few moments ago and he, you know, sharp as a tack. I asked him, when was the first time that we did a keynote together or at least at the same event? Yeah. I didn't know it was five years ago, which is the thing that was useful to know. But is it Aurora Public Schools? I think just down the street from where you are if you're not trying to disclose your intel. Yeah. So, Ontario and I were in Aurora, Colorado talking with some lovely K-12 colleagues and I saw Ontario, I think maybe for the first time, do something in his keynotes that I've always appreciated, which is to ask the question, what are you reading? So, Ontario, what are you reading right now? What am I reading right now? I just, so it's funny, I'm reading, we do this till we free us by Maryam Kaba. It is a popular book that I think books are reading. I recommend it as a thing. I'm only part way through it. I knew her work. I got in a whole argument about this book. I went to a tattoo parlor on speaking of annotation. I went to a tattoo parlor on last Friday and got in a big argument about abolition with the guy who's permanently putting something on my body. And so that was around abolition. So that was a fun thing to talk about. Yeah, Christy, I think it's an excellent book. Randy, what are you reading right now? Yeah. So I'm reading a lovely text by Dr. Cheserey Warren. This is about centering possibility in black education this summer. I'm teaching a class called school and society. And so given many things that are happening right now, this seems like an appropriate text. And we'd actually love to hear from folks as we all begin to gather this morning, like, what are you reading? You know, drop it into the chat. People are introducing themselves. They're telling us where they are or where they're from. But you're very welcome in our chat this morning as we start this really kind of casual conversation. What are you reading right now? And if you want to take it a step further, I think if folks know there's a conference hashtag, whether you're on Twitter or you're on Instagram, take a picture of the book cover. Take a picture of your annotations. Put it out on the feed and we can start to curate a list of what we're all collectively reading. So thanks, Ontario. We're going to start this conversation today with some reflections. Ontario, we've written a book together. Put it out in the world. We've invited people to mark it up. And we've invited people to have what we're calling an Anno Convo, an annotation conversation. And this book, it's been out in the world for a few months now, at least in this form. And we can talk maybe a little bit later about its earlier iterations. But we've received some really interesting responses. And I'm wondering if you can help take us into this moment and this bit of discourse. Yeah. I have a grumpy dog behind me who has feelings about this. But a friend and colleague, Victor Lee, he's a professor here at Stanford and the current president of the Society for Learning Sciences. He kind of went on a mini thread. There's a series of tweets that is the first one that he shared a couple of weeks ago that really just talks about, you know, growing up, right, the fear of damaging and writing in books made it feel taboo, right? Like who gets to write in books and what's it mean? And now, you know, as a stuffy Stanford professor, right, he has plenty, he clarified that he has plenty of books that he can write in. And even then, like it still creates something of an anxiety, a feeling of anxiety to, you know, take pen to paper and write in the book in the way that I think Remy, you and I deliberately envision people writing in our book, right, that we want people to do. And so I think this makes us, at least makes me think of, you know, who, like who has the privilege, who has the power to get to write in books, where those practices learned and what kinds of lessons are carried with the practices of annotation? I can give an example. I think we'll share a couple of pictures in my classroom back when I used to be a high school teacher in a moment. But, you know, when I was a teacher, I realized what was really powerful for me was going to college and getting to write in books as an English major, right, getting to, getting to mark things up and, you know, probably as a dumb 18-year-old feeling smart trying to, trying to jot my notes in, I don't know, Faulkner or some other kind of problematic, dead-white author. And I tried to replicate those practices when I was teaching my students. And so I'd buy like the cheap Dover editions of Shakespeare, or I'd buy my students their own copies of the autobiography of Malcolm X specifically to teach them. We would annotate and mark up the books at the same way, right, everybody underlined this sentence and write this in the margins as a practice of a culturating towards annotation in a way that has a very different relationship to books than I think what kids are schooled to do, in particular kinds of context. I think that might be a starting place. And Raymond, I don't know what your thoughts were when Victor started sharing this tweet on June 3rd. Well, of course, like you made me think a lot about notions of access and participation. And it led eventually, and Victor and I went back and forth on Twitter a bit, and again, we've been having these conversations in various forms for years with readers. And it got me to ask this question about these rights, so to speak, the kind of norms or these cultural practices, some of which are literally written down and some of which remain unwritten that are associated with annotation. Now, I know that you shared this tweet in its other forms and other spaces, and I believe that you got this response. Is that right? Yeah, so I will confess for a couple of you who follow me on Instagram, I'm trying to figure out how to use Instagram. I do not know that platform well and so I make messy stories and don't quite know what I'm doing. So I took Victor's tweet and just put it as an Instagram story. And then a good friend, Danny Martinez, a professor at UC Davis, powerful literacy scholar, replied to me, which then I took his reply and made it public because that's what I do with Danny. But he wrote, damn, how about getting in trouble in school because you wrote on the Los Angeles Unified School District issued book. Damn, man, why you got to be racist like that? And so he's both joking but kind of reminding, particularly for the black and brown students that Danny and I both taught as we taught in South LA, South Central Los Angeles, and he and Watts. The idea of not writing, of writing in books was something that just wasn't permissible. It's just something that's not allowed. And I think Danny ties this, at least in my interpretation of knowing him as a teacher, it's kind of specifically two issues of race and class in a large metropolis like Los Angeles. So that annotation is specifically not something that is encouraged and is actively discouraged by systemic power in the country. So that felt like a nice starting place. I also just wanted, because I'm trying to follow the chat as we're talking, which probably isn't the best active presence, but Deans, I appreciate your comment here. When you go back and look at your annotation and you can see, it's like a different version of you that might have been annotating in the past. And I think that's just a useful reminder of the historical record, which I think we'll also get into as we keep talking. So, Ontario, you remind us that annotation expresses power. And this is a key argument that we make in the book in a variety of ways. But these are photographs that you took, right, from... This is my very first classroom. This was, for people who are wondering, this is room P75 at Manuart High School. They call it a bungalow, but it is just the portable building that should have been demolished years ago. The first... When I first went in that classroom in 2006, I think is when I was teaching in there, there was a young tagger who I never met, but whose presence, like a ghost, just devoured every space of that classroom. You turn over, this is the trashcan on the left-hand side. It's a Fonse Wadi on the bottom of the trashcan and marker. And if you look at the power breaker on the right-hand side, this same tagger had also tagged the power breaker Fonse Wadi. And I remember using the white screen to pull down for an LCD projector. And when I pulled it down, the entire thing, I don't have this picture, was tagged Fonse Wadi. And I just appreciate the overwhelming presence of this young person who, despite schools not allowing kids to annotate, this student had clearly made their presence well known within this classroom. This was their domain much more than mine. Two years later, I would randomly... Like a desk drawer, and sure enough, there would be a Fonse Wadi there. It's probably still there now, which I'd love to think about it. Yes, this person... Yeah, I think that's the right word. This person was prolific as an annotator of a particular space and context. And in the same way that LUSD is trying to control and shape power around annotation, this student also is expressing a kind of enactment of power. And so I think a couple other images of graffiti, but graffiti's been the thing that when I think about my classroom context and my teaching context, stays with me as an analog annotation practice. Absolutely. And so then tell us about this book because you also included this here, and I think as I was looking at this and as we've been talking, it reminded me of something that we've written about in our book now, about annotation functioning as a resource that is leveraged like your student across, again, text and social settings, constituencies for their ideological ends. Yeah, so I don't know, and maybe in chat, I don't know if Always Running is a popular mainstream book, but at least in South Central where my students were, this was a popular memoir that many of my students read. It is about gang life in Los Angeles and is told from the point of view of someone who experienced that life. There's a couple of things I want to point to. So this is the cover of the book. It is blurry. This was a picture taken with a phone a decade and a half ago, right? So you just think of the blame Apple, I guess. But there's two things I want to think through, right? There's a book cover and it gives you the content information of someone's back tattoo and the title of the book and poll quotes. There's an ugly label that the school has then annotated on top of it. AR stands for accelerated reader. It is a proprietary product that allows students to know if they are allowed to read this book. It allows you the level and the number of points they get for the book, right? So you get this assessment practice that is annotated on top of it. That's fine. And most of the books look like that at the school and in a way that is pretty interesting to label. And you can see that lower levels, the books look dumber, right? It would use the language that my students would say. They look like children's books that you're giving to teenagers, right? They become floppy picture books. And so you can think about the demoralizing reading practices around the AR system. But the other thing that's harder to see on here is that fact tattoo picture on the cover of the book is also marked up by students who are tagging that cover, right? So there's, it's not just one tagger. There's a conversation that's happening across different students crews tagging the cover of this book, right? So they see a book about gang affiliation and they too are marking that with different kinds of affiliations and labeling. And so you can read a kind of history and lineage of who's engaging with this book, whether or not they're opening the cover is a different thing. But I think it's fascinating to think through like these three different kinds of annotations that are happening on this one cover and the ways that they're enacting different kinds of conversation and power. It may not be in relation to one another, right? I actually don't think the kids who are marking up their crews are the same care about the AR sticker and vice versa. But there is a parallel set of annotation practices happening there. And I don't know. I think maybe coming back to Fonse Wadi and whoever this young tagger was, right? The world around these kids is constantly annotated. Everything around them has writing on it and whether or not it counts is the conversation that to me has been as we finish the book and thinking about what we didn't get to put into it, this is what it's been coming back to. What counts and who does it get to count for particularly if I think about the students at this school as an example? Absolutely. And so then speaking of students at this school and writing around them and writing on their world narratives on their world, we happen to write again that annotation like these other media megaphones, tweets, spray paints in this case, it's a tool that can be used purposefully. What's the purpose here? What do we see this learner doing? The lesson I want to share here and Remy, I apologize. I dumped a whole bunch of pictures in our slide deck and Remy is doing the masterful job of pulling them together with what the narrative was with all of these and is doing great, but trying to recognize how does this picture relate to the always running picture? Our school had some amazing murals and professional graffiti artists who came in, I don't know what a professional graffiti artist is, that's a whole other can of worms, had renowned graffiti artists come in and create these murals across the campus that were beautiful. This talked about the family trailers, it was like a family center outside the parking lot at the school. The fascinating thing to me is you can see the kind of from maybe something closer to an objective lens the kind of artistic intent that people might differentiate from what they think as quote unquote, gang graffiti. I tend to disagree with these distinctions but I think most people could see this as artistic and I realize that is a subjective statement. What you're seeing is the custodian painting over the tags here, so this was a beautiful mural that is now being painted back to as a graffiti critic talked about in Los Angeles several years ago, the Beijing of the LA city, that all the graffiti is just painted over with ugly beige paint which somehow just makes the city uglier than if the graffiti wasn't there to begin with. There is something fascinating to me about there was a purposeful label and use of this particular text was applicable for school context and even then our eyes in terms of interpreting the social context of what graffiti stands for and as an annotation practice makes it invisible as a purpose and so it again becomes painted over by the school and this happened with most of the murals on campus as well, they eventually all were ceded to time and to traditional authority in that sense. I think there's a lesson here, I'm not quite sure what the lesson is, but it's a starting point here. Obviously I clearly misinterpreted the images. I was throwing all this together, but actually it's really quite apropos because we're about to talk about redaction. So redaction as annotation is really a nice little thing through here, that's great. So what's going on here? Oh boy, alright, I promise these are the I'd put an embarrassing picture of myself in here. So there's two more kinds of annotation moved beyond graffiti and talk about talk about maybe analog annotation, so our school moved to a school uniform which the students didn't love and so these are the hands of my friend Peter showing one student's annotation practices. So what he would do the student who didn't want to wear the uniform would wear his hoodie in class every day or into school walking past the security guards with just the collar of his school uniform as a means of demonstrating that the student was wearing the uniform and then would take off the collar and would be able to participate in school without actually wearing the uniform. I think there was a brilliant kind of cloaking maybe, maybe a literal cloaking if it was with the hoodie that allowed the student to move in as an annotation practice. The other side is this was our bathroom pass that I'm demonstrating here. They gave every classroom a yellow construction safety vest that if you wanted to go to the restroom you needed to wear this vest. My students found it really demoralizing. I found it really stupid as a thing. I also got in a lot of trouble at my school. It's coming across here. I told my students this is an ugly vest one student suggested I could paint it for you and so it's not a very good picture but what he painted was a big fist holding up a fist on the back of the vest and I'm like that's pretty cool. It fits in with the lines of solidarity and activism that I was trying to instill in my classroom and so this was one of two days where this vest was allowed until when my students wore it and it got confiscated by the security guard. When I talked to the principal about why there's still a functional vest it still looked like the other hall passes. It got confiscated they said because it might be confusing they might not understand how the vest functioned and so there's something around I think that's bullshit that doesn't make a whole lot of sense of why you would confiscate the vest but I also understand why they did it I think it probably wasn't the best adult decision I made to have my student graffiti the vest for power for my students but there is something to think through what are the kinds of political choices I think to the quote here every kind of annotation is a political annotation it is an objection of the school uniform to take the collar and wear that as a way to get into school it is an objection to the ways that we dehumanize students by making them look like construction workers in order to go to the bathroom on their campus and in order to embarrass them I think there is a lesson here for students to think about and the ways that we I think the kind of cat and mouse game of school is useful to think through it is often times adults trying to squash young people's ingenuity is where we see contestations of power it is where we see the viral images of usually young black boys and girls who are being body slammed to the floor as the viral images by police officers are about contesting particular kinds of racialized power in this country so what does it mean to take sides and potentially act in solidarity with young people what does it mean to question those mechanisms and at least to me how can we how can annotate function in that way and I think this is a thing that we will get into throughout this but the question that I would have maybe for you Rami but for everybody is what are the ways that annotation is doing good in the world to the Miriam Kaba book we do this till we free us how is annotation and for the 62 of you in the session right now how are your annotation practices making this world freer and who is us in that sentence I think those would be the things I would push as I was thinking about these images Rami sorry I feel like I'm just rambling at you this is great because it relates so well this is exactly why we are bringing ourselves into conversation with each other because our thinking is always changing as well and our thinking is also in this case bouncing off of other people's ideas that have been even in this conference this week about our colleague and our friend Sharice Gibbride she presented as a panelist about the relationship of annotation practices and digital literacies on Monday and then on Tuesday she was listening to our other friend and colleague Joe Dillon who is again a K-12 educator here in the Denver area speak about his practices engaging students in annotation and I love what kind of Sharice is saying in conversation with Joe it really echoes in terror what you're talking about as well at one point Sharice says we are privileged perhaps we being educators or we being adults we are the ones who are privileged to be able to know what it is that students see and think really honoring the ways in which they are reading their world and then they can also write their world and then it's up for us to design towards those ends to the question you just mentioned to design perhaps towards more liberatory more justice oriented ends I love that Sharice is reading Joe's commentary and it echoes your questions and it ultimately again I think for us and for some of the questions that we've tackled in our work comes back to this core question of how do learners write annotation and again like do they write annotation in perfunctory ways in ways that perhaps may be seen as irrelevant or is that a form of resistance and is that also a form of creative agency and so sitting with this question important for us and so then here's the connection back to redaction though right so here's the the trailers and you know covering up of the murals and the graffiti but in a different way and so tell us like tell everyone a little bit about how as we were writing our book our engagement with Isabella Hare the poet and how we how we saw her work yeah and it's been you know she's been someone who's been in loose conversation since since reaching out to her to include this this image and this work in in the book right but you know I think as a blackout poet I think she's she probably identifies as a poet broadly but the genre here is blackout poetry right so she's taken the apology letters her her book it's a really powerful book is a collection of all of the of of many apology letters from terrible predatory men who've been part of the identified as part of the Me Too movement or have led to the instantiation Me Too movement and so what you can see here is her taking Harvey Weinstein's apology statement blacking out most of the text and making and remixing it into something much more critical and much more powerful right and I think it is at least for me when I sat when I sat down and read through the book it is it is an emotional and powerful statement to think through what's it mean to redact what's it mean to give voice when things are voiceless I've been thinking about maybe some of you since the New York Times documentary I've been thinking about Britney Spears and her conservatorship and what's it mean for her to be literally be given voice in court after you know more than a decade of not having agency over her own actions yesterday and basically asking for the same free will that I think most of us are afforded right as a kind of example here right it's it's not an annotation I wouldn't argue I'd be able to have like the theoretical conversation with some of you but there is something fascinating to think through like what's it mean to extract voice to take voice from someone else's harmful words what's it you what's it mean to find new voice from what's within there I think there maybe it is something like a I don't quite know how trees work but I think you can tap a tree for maple syrup if it's the right kind of tree in the right kind of context the right kinds of tools that this is probably the right the right parallel but what's the what's the maple syrup from from the different kinds of statements that we might build a poll from didn't expect to go down the maple syrup route trees work is absolutely correct well it's an interesting analogy because of course people don't ask trees for their consent when they tap them from maple syrup which is how I'm going to bring it back to this because I know that at least this community from both technical perspectives but also from again more politically oriented perspectives have really grappled with the relationship of annotation to consent yeah that's a question that we talk about in our book we touch on it we wrestle with it we have a section of our chapter about power that explicitly asks the question can I annotate that and you know in engaging with Isabel and getting permission from her her consent to feature her work we also know that she did not ask consent to redact and share and then publish her versions of these sexual assault apology statements right and so I think that we don't make in our book a blanket case that consent is irrelevant in fact we make a pretty powerful argument I think that it's really important to consider context as a paramount element of the power dynamics and often differential relationships that exist when engaging in the active annotation but I think that Isabel's work her poetry and this particular use of redaction also to the redaction of covering of the graffiti you know it then relates to this question here who has the right to annotation which I think is something that we should all really sit with whether we're educators in classrooms or whether we're designing technologies that allow people to take notes wherever that may be it feels like in addition I think if I was thinking about this with my students in my classroom today the same students in the Fonswadi classroom I would think about the can I annotate that both from a good technical perspective but also the I think ethics is probably a thing we don't teach very well in schools but it's the should I annotate that and I think that that gets to a deeper reflection of ourselves in relation to the world and you know to Sharice's tweet from a couple of slides ago right like this is I think you know probably that the reason I spend so much time doing educational research when I could be in a classroom probably being like I think I was a pretty good teacher and I don't do that anymore I don't have the energy in the way that I did in the past is really because I think it's about believing young people as genius and as brilliant and I think Sharice is getting to this of how do we ensure that young people's voices are participating in the civic world around us right that is the large perspective of why I've sold out and live in the academy to some extent it's about trying to elevate young people's voice in civic society I think the should I should I annotate that right is the beginning kinds of conversation that young people should have I can't not talk about the pandemic and I think we'll get to it but an image I've been thinking about lately from same time I was in the classroom I remember teaching about Hurricane Katrina my second year as a teacher I was thinking about the ways that houses in New Orleans were annotated to point to if bodies were in those houses and other kinds of dangerous information right and I think about the ways we marked up in another kind of graffiti graffiti these houses to indicate the kinds of damage and loss and trauma that occurred in different kinds of communities and so I don't think our nation has anywhere near considered the ongoing trauma and harm and healing that's going to have to happen in this country as a result of the pandemic and the hundreds of thousands of people that have died we've talked you and I have talked about the New York Times cover as a kind of example here as a memorial but there's no wide scale memorial in the same way that we can think about for George Floyd or for other kinds of localized loss and murder that have happened and what's it mean for us to think through how might annotation in that way remind us I think all of us have been hit personally by the pandemic and if I lost or know people who have lost people or have been forever changed by it but what would it mean to take the scale of what happened in Katrina and to be able to visually see across this country the ways that things have happened across the world but I'm thinking from a U.S. perspective right now absolutely and we're going to certainly in just a moment touch on dual pandemics and how those are marked and remarked and memorialized just as an interesting segue here because Ontario you were just mentioning the importance of kind of youth civic activism and the need as you were saying to really find ways of amplifying you know learners, young people's visions of their futures both within formal schooling and outside of it and that of course resonates I think so strongly with our keynote from yesterday just a quick shout out to again our colleague we both know him well Prof. Manuel Espinosa and again his colleague in the right to learn Dignity Lab Frida Silva when they were giving their keynote here and I annotate yesterday they mentioned Du Bois is the freedom to learn and I immediately jumped on to the Internet Archive thank you so much Internet Archive I found this particular essay from 1949 there was a question towards the end of Frida and Profes keynote asking about the name of right to learn where does that come from and they mentioned this quote of all the civic rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental and I think that it's important for us to reference that prior orientation given even some of our commentary this morning to kind of hold this in our minds as well as we move into some of our additional commentary and I think that we're talking in some ways about maybe a more humble act an act of annotation but this idea of again the right to learn as perhaps a broader umbrella to the right to annotation again brings me back to these sets of relationships that we've now been kind of talking across the last few moments and I think is what we want to really orient everyone to today is that there are rights of annotation these kind of again norms and cultural practices written and unwritten that then in the form the way in which people write as annotation and again what is permissible and what is not and ultimately speaking to this broader question of the right to annotation and so we can see this across these examples again examples of redaction and expression or expression being covered by redaction and again how we understand more broadly this right to learn and it brings us here to our pandemics right pandemics that many people but of course in very different ways have been wrestling with buffeted by and again as you said irrevocably changed because of not only over the past 15-16 months but of course for centuries and so I want to orient all of us to this this photograph Ontario and I have shared it before and we use it as to kind of again help expand this conversation about what counts as annotation so if you follow the link at some point you'll notice that this was featured in New York Times article just over a year ago at a time when again protests in support of Black Lives specifically in response to Granite Taylor and George Floyd but of course many other injustices and also then the ongoing you know just upheaval resulted in a wall a temporary wall but a wall being placed around Lafayette Square next to the White House and so in this photograph we see two learners, two leaders, two writers, we see Zaden Kuevas and we see Angelica Kuevas the article doesn't specify if that's his mother perhaps an older sister or an aunt but here we see Zaden and Angelica Kuevas and you know Ontario you and I both used to teach you know again people about Zaden's age you were of course telling us stories of your students earlier and so when we see this kind of an image I think it's a useful reminder for us that we can reorient ourselves to these three tensions these three opportunities right around the rights of annotation to right as annotation and then the right to annotation and so you know we'll just riff a little bit more here but you know we seldom can test these questions with our cookbooks right you know when we open up our cookbooks and we talks about food that we eat we often don't worry about the rights of annotation and what is or is not permissible and whether or not writing annotation is something that should be again contested and in some cases again to Victor's tweet earlier and to some of the conversations that you mentioned people have then different relationships to their everyday texts whether those everyday texts or you know manuscripts from you know decades if not centuries ago you know or the newspaper but it ultimately again brings us back to the built environment and your broader social and political discourses right in that whether we're looking at the Berlin Wall or looking at again the debate around what is a monument and how is a monument quote unquote defaced or counter-storied that we see these relationships in our everyday texts and our everyday social and political contexts again wherever we may look yeah so I want to sit with the word everyday for a second but Raimi because of the site I also want to I feel like I want to recognize a great pun I made in the chat that you can't see and just want to validate myself I'm calling what you have here on the text the McConaughey principle because it's about alright alright alright and that feels like an important movie quote just to recognize that it's not great when I think about everyday and I think about everyday texts and everyday people I mentor Chris Gutierrez speaks to young people's everyday ingenuity and so I want to lift that language and I know Christina Stomatis was in this chat too and she's played with some of this and some writing that we've done together as well and so I think about the ways that what's it mean to talk about everyday texts in contrast maybe or in tension to school-based texts and the kinds of tensions of what Danny was talking about about the LAOSD books that we can't write into and so walls is everyday texts whether or not you're allowed to write in them they exist and think about we make the road by walking title of the as an example what's it mean to engage in everyday texts with quote unquote everyday people our example is focused on graffiti on Instagram, on Twitter except for the extent of the one AR book, accelerated reader book most of the examples that we engage with really are about places that kids tend to engage with thinking and learning and action and activism outside of what school counts what counts as school as well as I think what teachers might feel comfortable teaching about or teaching with I think those feel like some real boundaries right in the same way that there's this wall erected around Lafayette square there is a wall erected around schools sometimes literally there's a big fence around the school I taught in but also I think cognitively and figuratively in terms of what counts as what gets in the school and what doesn't how porous is that boundary in terms of what's allowed to come into classrooms and not and what's surveilled what is illicit right I think those might be some conversations that I'm thinking about with all this right now absolutely absolutely which I think just again it's so helpful because here on tarot you know speaking to what is again sanctioned by schools we can see annotation again in some contexts and maybe not in LA certain classrooms as an everyday literacy practice but again we've tried to shift the conversation here I think for the sake of time I'm going to quickly move through the next set of questions but I think again I hope that these are questions that resonate particularly for folks who are watching and listening and who are educators which is that in the work that we're doing we're seeing annotation as an intertextual practice which raises first perhaps a question of what discourses can learners join remix and resist through the kinds of intertextual practices this particular sign for those who want me to read it out says if we can flatten the curve we can bend the arc so you see there again an intertextual play our students of course can make similar kind of intertextual moves themselves again perhaps through annotation we see annotation as multimodal right and so then a question arises what modes of communication amplify agency agency for perhaps a learner like Zedan Cuevas right as he helps to then shape what does democracy look like you know we see annotations dialogic and so as discourses come into conversation with one another how might learners read and rewrite their world and again even again back to Cherise and Joe's kind of tweets and conversations at this conference it's incumbent upon us as educators to then be responsive to learners and their reading of their world and then their writing and rewriting for their world which I think for us leads us to another important example here which is the role that annotation again can not always but can serve as counter narrative and how can learners then kind of counter story injustices and there are some pretty compelling examples of that and certainly the art of Alexandra Bell comes to mind but as do a number of other examples and so again questions that we've been wrestling with as we work through our book again I'm just looking at my watch and I'm looking at the slides and so I just want to really quickly move through a really rapid review of one other aspect of our work which is this invitation again as contested and maybe as problematic as it may be to write in our book because again annotation is literally these are our digits and we can write in books and we invited folks to do that when this book was first drafted actually I think that some of the folks were with us today including some folks at Hypothesis joined in this open peer review that we ran for the book in the summer of 2019 we had quite a few folks participate and we had a lot of useful feedback as we then worked through our revisions and our thinking as again we've been sharing today and this led to the creation in our book of these custom illustrations here are two examples where you're actually seeing digital pub pub comments annotations that we then wove into these illustrations which are full pages in the book and it's now allowing readers to respond to us in this way so here's the original illustration as we mocked it up with these pub pub annotations and here's a reader handwriting their response and then sharing it on Twitter which is something that again you might do and others are doing and you know the rest of this deck just shows a few examples of folks who are taking that step and who are making their thinking visible a quick shout out to the work that we'll be doing later this summer so I'm going to wrap it there in terms of sharing slides because I want to really engage I think with people and the chat and what's going on here and so thank you for folks who've been watching I haven't been able to see anything because I've been sharing my screen but we're going to just kind of like let the conversation move forward Q&A, responses and thoughts as we continue to have this conversation with y'all. Yeah I'd say throw some questions in the chat if you'd like I think, yeah if you are if you have not participated in the hashtag ANNOCOMBO I think there's a really robust conversation that's happening with the book and with each other in that space and if you have participated and your books all marked up you should just buy another copy and start over again I think that's the beautiful thing about ANNOCOMBO you can do it Deonza mentioned earlier and see where you are wrong the first time you annotated it and try again that'd be my encouragement like asking where's the online copy and my answer to that is who would want the online copy when you can get a handy print version that you can mark up with your own hands The online stuff is that is a tricky contractual situation between MIT and e-publishing as a messy space is probably my real answer the pubpub copy is up you can access it now, is that right? It's still up, I looked at it again this morning because of the response that we got from folks during this open review and I should say given our commentary a few moments ago that the decision working with a publisher like MIT Press to engage in an open review was part of our initiative to not only practice what we preach but to again further kind of play in this very complicated space around power and voice we knew that writing a book would go through a conventional peer review process we knew that we would have some anonymous experts give us feedback and that we would be accountable to their perspectives but we also knew that it would be useful to have many people others, some invited and some who just showed up tell us what they thought and so that was another way that we could work on notions of success and participation and power in our own production of the work so that version is still online but because of that feedback we revised that version quite considerably prior to now what is the what is the book Yeah, I think that's right It's fascinating how I think the same way that an annotation might be stuck in time of a particular period when you annotate it our book is now fixed in time until we make the second edition and become millionaires from it It is a statement from a particular time and place Yeah I think there's a couple Q&A e-things Yeah, so Wonderful First of all, thank you for the question I think that there is let me say this, a lot of people who study scholarly annotation or even more specifically scholarly marginalia have a particular literal attachment I will say to this idea that annotations are permanent and we can get into a whole kind of technical side question about the permanence of notes that are added to texts and this idea of being anchored you know in a very kind of tight relationship in a very material way but your question about maybe augmented reality projections but also social media I think does help us to think about the more fleeting and in some ways the importance of notes that are added to texts but that that permanence is not necessarily a given and I think we can look at augmented reality we can look at projections like we saw on the monuments last summer as very important very intentional active annotation of restoring resistance of rewriting a narrative both in a literal and symbolic way but again those projections are not anchored to that text forever but in a particular moment and then through perhaps media that captures that moment and then archives it we do see those relationships in more proximal way I think I agree with that I think the thing I would add to that point though is I think everything at the right scale is temporary even to an archivist dismay and any kind of annotation be it an AR tool or an art installation can be just as temporary as the first folios of Shakespeare or of a wall erected around this country or around the White House and so I think that what I want to say is the temporary piece is we can think about the annotation actually Christina to your work around jazz is like a riff on a particular time and moment right and it is interplaying with the current context but also with the kind of statement in an authorial attempt I'll say I've been thinking a lot about temporariness the right adjective is here because I think the real dismal part of me thinks American democracy is not only in decline but is deteriorating rapidly and I would I would compare this to something like cooling water right the everyday every insurrection every kind of atrocity on human dignity that is happening makes this makes the water of the American fabric that much cooler in a way that we're just not paying attention to but at some point we will flip from 33 that is 32 degrees Fahrenheit and it will become ice and we will suddenly see a world that is unrecognizable from the rest of us right at what point has annotation either prepared us for those practices with young people to the emancipatory practices that I think someone asked in the Q&A and at what point have we not prepared young people for a new kind of landscape of where we're going right I think I think this is a real this this sounds maybe lofty but I genuinely think this is where we're headed and probably much more quickly than I think a lot of us are comfortable thinking about in school in context yeah Jeremy well so let me just kind of riff here as well I think that we need to grapple more with it an example from our drafting of the book that got cut and it got cut because the historical record at least that we were able to dig into it's hard to read is the removal of an explicit statement against the enslavement of people to the king of England by those who drafted the Declaration of Independence it's clear that that initial draft of the declaration included a more explicit denunciation of slavery and it's also implied in a number of historical documents that there was an editing process in which those words were removed and so we can think of that again as some form of editing redaction revision that included some kind of annotation but the versions of the declaration that still exists don't show a clear enough use at least in what we were able to access to show that particular annotation but scholars like Daniel Allen have written about this and of course her book is tremendous and so Jeremy I'm with you I think there needs to be much more thought around this but I guess my broader wrestling is that there is a social life of annotation and we can look across the historical record as well documented as that record may be to see the ways in which annotation has been used or at least is an indicator or a mark of things that have become oppressive things that have made statements about more liberatory futures and I'm also thinking about the fact that anyways there's just too many examples of annotations serving as marks of broader social injustice so we should wrestle with this Jeremy I agree I mean a kind of example like this I'm staying at my in-laws right now this is like the not most exciting background here but I walk my dogs around this neighborhood and I walk past this elementary school actually my wife went to many years ago and you know there's big fence around the elementary school it's typical there's all these signs right some are social distancing signs some are about security cameras some are about school policies and where visitors need to check in when the school is operating and to some of the work that my colleague Jonathan Rosa speaks to in English it's fascinating to me which kinds of signs are translated into Spanish and which aren't and so which signs are there about inviting community which signs are there about legality and which signs are there about communicating necessary and safe information right and so to me this is the opposite to some extent of it's still graffiti it's still words on walls to some extent right but this is power enacting particular kinds of visions of who gets part of this community and what kinds of ways and so I would just think about what are the signs when you walk into the post I guess I don't know if people are safely walking into the post office right now but you know when you're walking into a building what signs show up and what language are they saying and what kinds of assumptions is it making about the literacy practices of a social community yeah I really appreciate both parts of this question I'm curious what free form writing is and why schools wouldn't support it maybe as a starting place as someone who has at some point in my life taught the five paragraph essay I think I know what not free form writing is but why don't we make all writing free right let's use the word free as a starting place there gateways interesting I'm not sure if I think of it as a gateway or if it is the creativity in and of itself like that's what I wonder is the gateway gateway you know there's also the Arndatte Roy quote that was really popular during the pandemic of you know pandemic is portal and we're going to step through to this other public to this other imaginative world it didn't happen right like a year and a half later we are still on one side of that portal and I think people are just as oppressed as they were before if not more so and you know I think about you know what would what would a gateway through annotation actually mean for us to construct and you know for two cis men to make a decision of what that gateway looks like in 2021 yeah yeah perhaps also in the same way that and the question perhaps thank you again for the question reminds me that there's still so much gatekeeping about who's texts and whose narratives are included in schools and so maybe annotation you know as separate from other forms of again creative writing analytic writing expository whatever kind of formal aspects of literacy instruction are kind of codified in school that annotation is a way to expand the register of whose ideas one is engaging with and I think that you know we can as literacy educators and teacher educators look to various social media discourses whether it's you know build your stack and people sharing you know images of books that they're reading to disrupt texts you know to the book chat kind of literacy education spaces where educators are trying to I think expand the register so to speak of what counts as quote-unquote the canon and as a complement perhaps to those kinds of efforts and initiatives annotation is one way of encouraging students to come into conversation with those perspectives those authors those ways of being as a way of recognizing that there are many analogies here and many voices that count in this kind of academic discourse yeah I love that I think Chris mentioned the marginal syllabus in here Rami have you already talked about that elsewhere do you want to give a shout out you know I'll give a quick shout out Sherice actually did a really lovely job of mentioning it in the digital literacy session and I'll just say that we see this as another way of just encouraging the kind of interest-driven more equity-oriented approach to professional learning that some teachers really thrive to engage with I see that Joe Dylan this year he's of course a co-founder and facilitator of that you know your friend and colleague but again it's just leveraging the social affordances of annotation as a way to engage with critical conversation some people will pick that up some people will run with that some people will see that as a model but it's like think again one project of many that is you know we don't have grand ambitions that it's going to become it's a model and it's perhaps at this point five years in it's proven a certain point about how social annotation can play a central role in more equity-oriented professional learning yeah I think the data piece is interesting right I think that's the you know if a student's annotating whether or not they the idea of choice around this is fascinating right who gets to annotate and like are you expected to annotate could be really useful as a collection of data but what I would push on is data for whom and for what purpose right if it's about schools being able to speak to assessment metrics I could care less about that and I think that's actually particularly damaging personally and I also get why schools want that right if it's students being able to see for themselves here's where my colleagues and my peers are thinking and here's how we might be able to work towards something that's intersectional and collective and powerful then I think we can get to something pretty powerful I might reimagine a quote-unquote canon if that's a conversation that still needs to happen right now in terms of what are the most important texts for young people in this part of the country in this current context would be a starting point for me personally absolutely my friend hey we did it look at this I know that we've run up on our hour and again just on behalf of you know folks who are here and who will also watch this show thank you so much for engaging with us as you can see Ontario and I are engaging in rough draft thinking we're working through our thoughts about this and I think that there's a long history of that and there will continue to be a practice of that and our book is again just a point in time along that rough draft thinking journey around these issues so thank you so much for thinking with us today reach out be in touch connect and again thanks to to come forward