 It is my great pleasure to welcome our first keynote of INA 2021, Courtney McClellan. Courtney is the current innovator in residence at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. She has a long history of making art and sculpture and thinking socially at the intersection of media and civic life. And most recently she's been thinking a lot about annotation, which is why she's here. And she's going to share that thinking with us today. Courtney, the floor is yours. Thank you so much. I appreciate the invitation to speak here at Hypothesis. And I want to further thank Hypothesis Scholar and Residence, Ramey Collier, for making this connection. And I'm just thrilled to speak with you all today. What I sort of thought I would do today is introduce myself just a touch more, but focus on talking about contemporary artists using annotation because that's what I am. I'm a studio artist. And then the bulk of the time we'll spend talking about the development of my Library and Congress Innovator in Residence Experiment Speculative Annotation, which will launch this July. So in just a few short weeks. Again, just sort of a follow up of that introduction. So I'm a visual research based artist and I live in Atlanta, Georgia. My work covers a range of media, including sculpture, performance, photography and writing. And the project I made for the Innovator in Residence program is the first web-based application I've ever made. In subject, my work often addresses speech and civic engagement. And I've served as a studio art faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Georgia, Georgia State University. I have my MFA from Tufts University. And most recently I was the 2019-2020 Roman J. Witt Artist in Residence at the University of Michigan. So just a little bit about the Innovator in Residence experiment and program. So as I said, my project is called Speculative Annotation. The program at large is a creative research residency funded by the Library of Congress Labs. And innovators such as myself work with Library of Congress collections and staff to create a short-term experimental public project. In this case, a public art project that intends to enrich the work, life and imagination of the American people. So in order to kind of start thinking about annotation and sort of how I became interested in annotation, I think it's important to think about how contemporary artists are using annotation. It's a trend that I've seen in the last, certainly five or six years, but probably reaches much farther back. And I've seen many artists using annotation in their practice. And so I thought I'd share just a couple of artists that I think are using it in interesting ways. And this will really just be a brief touch on them. So hopefully if you're interested, you can follow up more about their work. But I wanted to give just a little bit of context. So this first artist I'm sharing is Bethany Collins. Bethany Collins is an artist living in Chicago and makes work about the intersection of race and language. Collins regularly responds to historical documents, songs and literature. Collins uses annotation in one form or another in almost all of her work. And in this case, I'm showing an example of Collins Eraser series in which she erases printed text using a black magic eraser so that much of the text is unreadable. So it's really kind of leaving behind just some kind of trace of language and then sort of highlighting certain aspects of the text. I think this work is particularly that she did a series about the Odyssey. Another artist using annotation is Wendy Redstar. Wendy Redstar is a multidisciplinary artist who in this case created a series of annotations for an exhibition at Mass Mocha in North Adams, Massachusetts. This particular annotation is an annotation of an elder in her tribe. And so this is an annotation of Medicine Man. So a little bit about Wendy Redstar. So raised on a core reservation in Montana, Wendy Redstar's work, and this comes directly from her website, is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Redstar seeks to incorporate and recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives in work that is at once inquisitive, witty and unsettling. The last artist that I would just touch on today to think about annotation is Laura Owens. And so Laura Owens is primarily a painter, but in some ways, especially with the topic thinking about social annotation, I thought Owens was a great example. As part of her mid-career survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Owens created a series of emojis that could be downloaded by attendees. And so this you can see on the right is the emoji palette that she created so that people could annotate each other's language with her unique and specific emojis. And these could be downloaded and used on the premises at the Whitney, but also at large. So these were things that sort of left the gallery, jumped off the wall and existed in people's kind of social annotation life of communication. So I think this brings up kind of one broad question, and I certainly don't intend to speak for all artists, but mostly to kind of touch on an idea about why artists might be interested in annotation or why artists annotate. In many ways, it's the same reason scholars, journalists and scientists annotate to share opinion, to record information, to provide context or to react to the archive. Annotation is also a form of reframing or protest and offers the ability to draw attention to resonant passages or ideas. In addition to written text as a form of annotation, artists also have other tools at their disposal to share information. So some of these tools will kind of look at a little bit later, but something like line quality. So how the line is made, is it thick, is it thin, is it kind of wiggle, does it gesture in some ways color choice, the ability to collage and or a way to layer images. So in thinking about me specifically, as I was looking at these other artists and found so much inspiration and how they were using annotation, I realized that I was less interested in how I might annotate something and more interested in how others annotate. I'm somebody who has always loved finding notes in library books and who finds, you know, fascinating kind of pieces of detritus on the street that have text on and the people have shared grocery list, etc. And so I particularly began thinking about how other people annotated and how we might be able to facilitate that through a project with the Library of Congress. So I was particularly thinking about students and teachers as an audience for many reasons, both because I think they could actively use the tool and also because I think there sometimes are an underserved art audience. So I wanted to think about how I might stage a space for them to annotate historical material and primary sources from the Library of Congress. So just a little bit to kind of articulate exactly what speculative annotation is. Speculative annotation is an open source dynamic web application and public art project. The tool presents a unique mini collection of free to use items from the Library of Congress for students, teachers and users of all ages to annotate through captions, drawings and other types of mark making. Working with curators of the library and students and teachers in the classroom, I developed speculative annotation to provide a way for students to speak back to history. Speculative annotation connects items from the past with the day to day experience of users. It was made with a K through 12 audience in mind with the hope that the primary sources from the library's collections would be used by educators. The items are shared with contextual aids including curators, annotations and links to additional resources for further research on the library's website. The tool, as I said, will launch this July. And I wanted to go ahead and note a few important people to the project. So speculative annotation really wouldn't have been possible without a team. I am not a developer and so that was one of the kind of important things to build a team so to facilitate the creation of this project. And of course, everyone was inputting on creative choices as well as technical ones. So other people I wanted to kind of highlight are Jamie mayors senior senior innovation specialist at the LC labs. Adam Arling, who was the developer for the project. Jess Vue, who was our UX consultant and Olivia Graham, who was a graphic design intern. So just to kind of touch on why we call it speculative annotation and why that was important. So for me, I have been defining the speculation and annotation as the following speculation is engaging in or projecting on to future events. It's theorizing and imagining without knowing. In our case, we're thinking of annotation simply as a note of explanation or comment added to a text or diagram. So examples include margin notes highlighting and thought bubbles. And we'll see examples of all those in the tool. An additional question is why think about speculative. That sort of been an ongoing conversation and certainly was important to the inspiration of the project. So when thinking about speculative annotation, the tool enables students to analyze and examine historical materials through hands on engagement. History is an enduring mystery. Speculation is a form of investigation. This tool allows students to question and examine the point of view of the creators of primary sources. In response, students annotations are an interpretation. We're asking students to make their insights visible and in doing so join history's record. So that's kind of one important factor is that we're wanting students to develop some visual literacy skills and using the tool and we want them to find value and let them know that we find value in their joining history's record. Speculative is also a reference to speculative fiction, a term that covers fantasy to science fiction. While the presentation is going to focus on the topic of annotation, the essay I selected to annotate speaks to the topics of speculation and imagination. It is from science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin's introduction to the left hand of darkness, and this is an essay that I have thoroughly enjoyed and have used in many contexts. I hope you will annotate it with consideration for how Le Guin sees the relationship between the past, present and future, as well as the role of the artist in relation to this interpreting this particular topic. So some goals we set out for speculative annotation. And I'll say that my residency started in September and it's a year long residency so these were sort of goals we articulated very early on into the project and tried to kind of keep on returning to when we were making design decisions and choices along the way. We wanted to place K through 12 students in direct conversation with primary sources from the library's collection. We wanted to share these items with context, for example, asking curators and experts to annotate the items so students and educators can understand their history. And I'll return to that particular goal, because that was one of the biggest changes in design decisions we made. We wanted to provide a space for users of all ages to have a depth of experience with individual items from the collection. We wanted to connect items from history with the day-to-day experience of citizens and application users. And we wanted to explore technical solutions for supporting deep engagement with a singular item across formats at the library. So I'll say that's another kind of difference here is that many of the previous, so there have been three previous innovators and residents and most of them, they have done projects dealing with large data sets. And so this was a slightly different project we were selecting individual items to try to inspire deep engagement with students. So I'm going to show a brief video of just what the tool looks like and kind of demoing a small annotation. So as you can see here, there's a toolbar to the left. There is the ability to save and download at the top. You can also access some of your saved annotations in the top right if you're working on something. And one of the goals we set out is to make things very simple. That was something early on we heard from students to have kind of simple choices as not to make something so complicated. So there's a text tool, there's a drawing tool, a highlighting tool, a shape tool to kind of isolate aspects of an image, and then the stamps. So students can jump right in to starting to annotate. There's a limited color palette at the top. So some of this was to, and we kind of kept on going back to how is this an annotation tool, not necessarily a design tool, although it employs visual cues and material and hopefully is visually engaging. And the item we're looking at that's being annotated is a telegram from Aaron Copeland, who is a composer. So that was a large portion of our time and I'll talk about that in a bit about even just selecting items that we think would be exciting and viable for classroom users to use. So it's not a tool where they can pick anything on the library site, but instead currently there's a subset of about 40 items that people can select from to annotate. And there were some kind of technical limitations about the tool. So again, that's partially why it can't be used across the entire LOC wide. There were sort of limitations. It was also that we couldn't have a server. So everything is accessible and saved in the browser. So if you look at the metadata panel right now, and then there's also the staff annotation, which I'll talk about later. So that's just a very basic demo and introduction to the tool itself. So the process of creating speculative annotation. It was a highly collaborative and creative process. And throughout the process, my team and I conducted three kinds of research. First being studio experimentation and design. The second being collaborative curation of the speculative annotation mini collection with library staff. And lastly, the user testing class visits with students and educators. So a little bit about the studio experimentation. I wanted to stage a space where students felt valued with a conversation about shared history. So part of me was trying to do this to make this visually appealing to give them freedom to respond in ways they'd be interested in. And also to provide them hopefully with some interesting tools. In preparation for this, I worked in a printmaking studio to explore markmaking and printing processes in order to consider annotation as an artistic medium. Monoprinting and collage particularly inform the tool and can be seen in the hand cut stamps. So one of the things that sort of I think most unique about the tool is that there's a series of hand cut stamps that I cut myself that students can use to code or layer or encode by that. I mean, like add, you know, exclamation points, add stars, things that they're interested in use them as kind of visual cues in the actual active annotating. So I wanted the application to feel touched and handmade even in digital format. So that was another thing is thinking again about my love of finding notes and library books was this was partially to make something feel touched and unique and personal. These principles guided many visual choices in the resulting site. Along with my team, we designed tools and features and speculative annotation to contrast the visually to visually contrast the archival material presented in the mini collection. The color palette was inspired by colors regularly used for annotation like fluorescent highlighter yellow diverging from the muted colors of many of the age artifacts and allowing for annotations to be highly visible. Many of the stamp forms like an arrow or a pointing finger also allow users to draw attention to particular aspects of the historical items, while thought bubbles and punctuation marks offer a way to share ideas, opinions and emotional reactions. The curation of the mini collection. This was where I would say a large portion of our time went working with curators library staff and field experts we developed the mini collection in parallel with the creation of the speculative annotation website. Library curators provide a host of contemporaneous examples of historical annotation from the collection. Rosenwald and rear book curators for example shared that medieval manuscript materials that included ample margin space with the expectation expectation that scholars would add their own notes. At the time books were rare and expensive to create and scholars would often travel to a manuscript and document their findings directly in the same book. These historical examples of annotation influenced the layout of the tool for example the need for extra space around an item to allow for such annotation. Library staff also proposed works to be included in the speculative annotation mini collection. Through conversation with experts around the library several key themes related to storytelling and imagination emerged among the items. And that was again part of that speculative question how do we invite storytelling and imagination through the tools and through the items. The topics that covered and regularly address these concerns included civil and human rights the creative process and technological development. We worked with 12 different divisions at the library to create this collection for students and teachers. And so much of our time was sort of talking about to them about their needs finding out what might in their collections might be a standalone item that could be engaging and inspiring to students. We did user testing and again that sort of one of those things are from my kind of perspective I thought about it a lot as like community outreach but we were also of course doing user testing to find out what students and teachers might want from a tool and how they might utilize it. So that was sort of a big part of the efforts particularly last fall even into the spring where I was visiting classes while we were carrying out these other kinds of research. And right now we're looking at the list of classes that I visited which we would not have been able to create this tool without their engagement and support and particularly I'm thankful to them during a really challenging and difficult teaching year. I virtually visited classes throughout the development of the tool. These visits began with sharing the library's free to use digital collection and asking students to annotate them with the applications with which they were already familiar. We learned from the writings and drawing students made and listen to their advice about what they wanted. When the tool is prototype students and educators tested the site giving feedback and brainstorming solutions to educational and technical challenges. For instance students shared that they most often handed annotated with a highlighter. So a highlighter was added to the toolbar. They also wanted to be able to zoom deeper into images allowing for a more detailed view of a given item. Finally students suggested ways to make the tool more user friendly. For example they requested that the text tool be contained within a bounding box allowing students to write longer annotations that can wrap to multiple lines. Speculative annotation aims to foster visual literacy and interpretation of primary sources across subjects. The tool is informed by methods of historical analysis, literary close reading and studio art critique. And I think that brings up something important. You know you can see here the classes we visited we didn't want to make a tool that was just for history classes. We thought that these primary sources had need and had utility in art classes and photography classes and language arts classes. So that was really important to the practice and visit to the how do we make a tool that is flexible enough that it could be used in an elementary school language arts class and in a high school AP government class potentially. So I'm going to share just a couple of examples of student annotations. These were some of the ones we collected and we studied and learned from. And we did receive special permission to show this work of mine or so we did go through that process. And again just simply by having them share these with us. We were really engaged with what they wanted what they used what was exciting to them. How might the tool be transformed and of course as I already said they gave some really concrete and useful feedback as well as sharing these annotations with us. I know as the topic and thinking about the hypothesis tool about the social annotation I did want to address that in this talk. So currently students cannot co-annotate on speculative annotation simultaneously. That was something again that was limited by our inability to have a server. So although students cannot edit edit the same item on separate devices in real time they can share. So they can download and share these annotations one another and their teachers. It could be a direct email it lives in a PNG file or it could be sharing using hashtag annotate LOC and that's something that we hope will see people activating. We also hope that teachers can share their tools and resources and ways they've used speculative annotation in a similar manner. In the most simple and direct way we do hope that teachers might be willing and thinking about modeling the annotation for students. So the biggest addition and I think it's sort of to be my favorite addition to the tool as we've been working on it is LC staff annotations. So I think I noted in the demonstration that there was a small button on the lower left hand or a button that was orange that said LC staff annotation. And as we were talking to staff and as I mentioned kind of speaking to the 12 divisions we were working with we regularly heard concerns about how to provide context. And rather than seeing that as a problem I really saw that as an opportunity. So you can see that there was a metadata panel to provide very straightforward information about who made it where it was made when it was made. And there was also links to kind of additional research students and teachers could use. But I thought it would be interesting and to provide a way to have some personal understanding of annotations from the curators themselves. So I think this provided a couple of things one it's a model of how the annotations might look and what they might be used for. But I also think it's a way to kind of put students not just in conversation with history but at conversation with library staff. And so and in fact this for me was inspired by a project that was created at Isabella Stewart Gardner in which a contemporary artist asked staff and security guards to describe the famously missing paintings. So I wanted staff at the library to spend some time describing and looking at the tool looking at the items that's from their area and annotating them. So it was sort of a great joy and we asked them to annotate with several topics in mind. So one it could be providing additional historical context. It could be telling a personal narrative. It could be asking questions for students to respond to but about half of the items in our collection have these unique LC staff annotations that students can can access. So this one I'm sharing right now is an annotation of a Rosenwald manuscript material that we were including in the selection by curator Stephanie Stillo. And I also just love how wonderfully visual it is. This is an annotation of a photograph of the pecan sheller strike by Maria Guadalupe partita. And this annotation was another kind of great addition and enriching who Peter, who's we're describing here also created a podcast associated with this tool. So we wanted to kind of engage the students and the story that she was telling and then hopefully they'll go listen to the podcast she created also. So it's also a way I think of hopefully kind of drawing people into the larger story of each item in the collection. And lastly, this is an annotation of a Patsy Mink manuscript material done by Liz Novara. So this these annotations I hope will really enrich the project and also kind of exist as gyms to find in the tool itself. Before leaving I wanted to give an additional thanks to Adam Arling, just for you and Olivia Graham who were integral to this and I want to give additional thanks to Jamie mayors the LC labs team. I'm going to go ahead and take a look at a couple of them. Emily Kirkpatrick, the National Council of English teachers, cleanest Asian printmaker and just hydro and the team at triple I F these all these are all people who are vital to this project. In addition to the area specialists and the many teachers who who gave their time and resources and students who engage the project along the way. So from here I'm going to invite you to annotate on the selected at text, which is again the introduction essay to the left hand of darkness by Ursula Kalik when, and I'm also available for questions. Are there any questions I can answer. Yes, Courtney. I've been kind of monitoring the chat and the questions that they come through and thank you so much for that presentation. It's really refreshing to step away from the text tool and really immerse ourselves in the visual. A couple of questions here and then maybe we could move over to the reading that you've selected for annotation. I'll start out actually with one of Alex's questions if there were. I can show it on the stage actually, if there were unexpected uses of the tool subverting it for other needs, making the tool their own and making it appropriate for their contacts. Did you decide to resonate with you as something that happened during the project. So I'm wanting to make sure I understand the question so I think there's be one thing of where the students subverting the the tool. So there's one thing is that the only way to use the tool is to use items from the library's collection so it's not a space where somebody could upload an additional image so they can annotate something extra. The tool itself is open source so we're hoping that other cultural heritage institutions might want to reuse the tool and another context. And so that that's sort of one intention and hope in the larger process. Great yeah and Alex did confirm that you had anticipated his meeting right. Okay, good. I will say that I see that Jamie mayors the senior innovation specialist that I work with is in the chat and answering probably some of the technical questions. We can also invite Jamie up on stage if that would be helpful. Jamie, do you want to do that? Are you just going to field questions in the chat? She'll have to chat respond. Maybe while she's thinking about that, we could another question from Chris Aldrich and I'll again show it on the stage here. Does the tool have a way for students to take their annotations or data with them perhaps to put in a notebook commonplace book for future thought review or building upon? So the one place so again because it doesn't have a server, there's no way of like logging back on to a different computer. However, the information does stay on, you know, and within the kind of browser that it's in. So for instance, in my case, I have many saved annotations that I can pull up because I'm reusing my same laptop. So you can reaccess those as long as you haven't cleared your cache. However, there's not currently a space that you would sign on again, like I said, from a different location and be able to access another annotation. Got it. And actually, your colleague did say that they would be willing to come up on stage. So I'm going to see if I can make that happen as well. Give me a second here. Hi, I'm not very camera ready. I'm like literally an overalls. But I am I am happy to answer. There's some like technical questions about accessibility that I can happily speak to I saw several of them and I was trying to answer like one by one but it might be easier if I just share it here. But only if that's helpful, I can continue to do it in the chat whenever you guys want to share Jamie. I put this one question up on stage so people can see the context. Yeah, so the Library of Congress when it produces applications in in production they have to be section 508 compliant. My team and LC labs has a different workflow because we're an R&D like part of the library and so we create like fast build prototypes to test a concept to see how popular it is with the public. And we do this through a number of ways. But one of them is through art projects and that we sponsor such as hosting residents like Courtney. So hopefully that helps for context so spike of annotation is an experiment. It's produced as such. We host it for a short amount of time so it'll be hosted by the library for two years. And then if the library decides to adopt it and to put it into production, then it goes through the process you know as required by federal institution with 508 compliance etc. So hopefully that helps for context because I don't think that that is, you know, apparent especially because the application certainly doesn't look like a prototype it's beautiful. So that's one thing I saw and then another one is I was saying this in the chat but in case like people didn't see it because I was typing it fast. So there are several colors from the color palette that that do have accessibility compliance and it's a little bit more complicated because there's a light mode and a dark mode so there's colors that have accessibility compliance like based on what the background mode is. And there's also tags for the tools. So that's there but I in general because the tool is so heavily visual know it hasn't been tested with a screen reader, and the tool is open source, and we would absolutely love it. If anyone had feedback or wanted to fork it and had ways that they thought that the tool could be more accessible like you know in the short amount of time. So we did a dance basically we kind of do with all of these experiments where we made it so that it could be accessible, you know with the resources that we had and then if the library chooses to adopt it which we really hope it does it's been pretty amazing so far and it seems to be useful but can't say for sure what the organization will do. Then it will meet all of the requirements before it goes live live as a permanent tool. That was great so thanks for being willing to join us on this for the moment here actually pop on the stage. That looks like there might be one other question from Mark and then maybe we could turn over to doing some annotation on on your selected text Courtney. I'm going to put it on stage. And this is for Mark what if you could have a server and what if there was a button to save annotation.png an image file to the internet archive. Have you imagined what it might be like to actually save these artifacts digitally. So I'll try to answer and then Jamie if you have a different thought on this. So the biggest desire we've had for a server is so that it could be more of a social annotation so that students could be on the same image and be writing and also that they could share. Share them more easily that way so that's sort of a long term dream. We haven't gone heavily down that path because of limited expectations because it's a government institution about collecting personal data. And so we've always known that not having a server was one of the limitations but of course if somebody else was using it or if there was another way to kind of manage this the thought that students could co annotate or that a teacher could have you know every sort of it's you know in many ways what's fun about a hypothesis that people could be all one image together and be sharing ideas. So we love that possibility we just know that currently that's not feasible. Jamie would you add one thing to that which is that we spent money Courtney spent money and we spent money did a lot of extra work with our developers so that actually the architecture for this to be set up with a server is all in place. It's just that as a part of the context that I was giving before that this is a prototype that we don't use servers with the experiments that we launched that's something that will happen later. You know if the library chooses to support it as a permanent app and it goes into production, then it'll put resources into that and setting up all of the, you know best practices for how to store PII or not etc. So that's just a part of the technical constraints of this particular project. But the architecture is there and it was really fun. I mean if folks are interested it seems like they are in some of the technical aspects. The way that the tool works and has been set up for simultaneous annotation and this includes layering between the curator annotations, you know being able to layer on top of those or layer, you know having students in the same classroom layer their annotations on top of each other. The architecture set up in the JSON manifest file incredibly lightweight without PII so that basically if there was a server. I don't know if this is interesting to people but I'm just going to share it. That essentially the app is set up so that those markings are packed into a JSON file without PII and so your server is essentially hosting this really, really lightweight JSON file, and then it just recalls it back or recalls like multiple lines to layer. So the architecture is at Marling our developer is amazing and he set up a really eloquent like solution for this that would be really kind of sustainable and lightweight for any organization to host. So if there are folks out there that would like to use speculative annotation in that way it's a really lightweight. And then we also heard from folks as well. I love the idea of Internet archive as a way of archiving things. And the other thing I was going to say was that we also had some suggestions about using GitHub as a way of acting as a server affordance so if you were a GitHub user. You know this this app could be something that you could connect to your GitHub repo and it would store your annotation manifest files like within your own repo for you to recall them again and use them in the tool. So that's how it's set up and I hope that was easy. I think it was there's a lot of really deep technical geeks here in the audience and they're already grooving on that. So thanks for sharing that. If, as we move over to the essay. If someone here wanted to maybe get involved in a technical level or start to think about this. Well, how might they, how might they do that is there a way for for citizens to get involved. Oh my gosh please please do we it is a lot of overhead for us to get things published in a public like Library of Congress GitHub repo because obviously it needs to be scanned and everything so that we're not accidentally passing you know bugs like to folks who want to fork it or package it. We do a lot of work and we put a lot of resources into making sure these tools are open source, and that is exactly what we would like to see I mean we would like for you to get involved, I'll be one of the repo managers they'll be other people on the lab staff. We would love issues pushed we'd love to see people forking this we would love to see people using this in different contexts I saw chats about, you know, if someone wanted to set it up like using GitHub as a repo, like in the architecture that I was describing. Please do and there's other ways that you can get in touch with us at LC labs on Twitter. We're a technical team at the library. We love hosting conversations about the experience that we put out so that's one way. And we also have a newsletter that you can sign up to and you can find that information at labs.loc.gov and then once the tool launches in July Courtney is going to be doing a roadshow at a bunch of different venues and we would love to do some type of community Twitter chat so maybe there's a way for people in the hypothesis community to get involved in that. Great, those all sound like really really good ways to get involved. There's a lot of people here who spend a lot of time on get get forms of different kinds, not only GitHub but others too. Well, one of the reasons I wanted to invite Courtney to come back and kind of close this now because one of the reasons that we're working with this virtual manifestation of I annotate to have readings associated with sessions, so that the conversation can really start to happen maybe even before the session during the session and then continue on after. So it's actually okay if we don't have a whole lot of time now to do any kind of synchronous annotation. But if we would Courtney maybe we could just introduce the idea to them and maybe I'll share my screen so I can show it up here on the screen. Give me one just one second here, and then I will also ask you to explain why you picked this document and the first thing I just wanted to let people know is that in the external program for this conference there's a program built into air meets the platform that we're meeting in that where you can see the schedule and get to things. But there's a web document outside of the outside of the platform where every session is listed. And then as we get the session details for each one there will be a link to that. And so if I navigate now you'll see the session details for Courtney's session here today and you'll see that she has a place for an annotated reading which is actually this excerpt from Ursula K. Le Guin's left hand of darkness. And so would you, and I'll just say that you can open the hypothesis sidebar, and you can see other stains is already started to annotate on it and known, known, known annotator, but you can sign up or and or log into your hypothesis account right from there. So, Courtney, would you explain why you picked this text. Well, knowing the audience I thought that the talk itself was going to focus a lot on the idea of annotation. But I didn't want the term speculative to get lost in the mix and so for me this is an essay that really introduces, you know, Ursula K. Le Guin is often going to use the term science fiction that I would kind of suggest that we're speaking about a more kind of broad speculative fiction to and thinking about what speculation does. And so this is a writer who writes fiction talking about the utility of speculating imagining thinking about the past and the future and the way they relate to one another which is of course the hope here that students will will help them imagine the future. So it's sort of this this time travel goal, this kind of poetic text that is also still very I think accessible and concrete and it's a text that I love, and that I have taught in in many contexts and often So hopefully it will be an enjoyable read that will help kind of inspire some interesting thoughts about speculation imagination, the past, the future, and certainly was integral into me proposing and creating speculative annotation so this is sort of an inspiration text I would say. That's great and we can see people already doing that and so we invite everyone throughout the conference to come back to these documents and continue the conversation there. We can have a lot of ineffable chat here in the conference venue itself. But when we have it out on these documents with annotation it'll it'll actually have a more lasting quality to it. Well I really want to thank you Courtney for being here today and kicking off this conference was just fantastic to hear what you're doing and your thoughts on other artists at work. Is there anything that you'd like to kind of leave us with as a parting gift as we head on to the rest of the conference. I mean hopefully the text itself will will do some of that but really with this idea about how annotation is visual as well as information it is artistic. In any format the way the text you choose the way it's laid out there's information in that kind of method to and so I would just sort of encourage everybody to keep on thinking about how annotation is an artistic artful gesture as well as the information educational and formative gesture and that those two things can fit together beautifully so hopefully we'll see more of that. Well thank you so much for being here I'm sure we'll see all sorts of emojis flying across the screen chat chat going on there is a little emoji button on the bottom that you can use to send little signals to the screen which is a form of annotation as well. I'll just let everybody know that you can also visit the lounge area here in air meet and you can actually meet up you can sit down on the table and meet with other people so if you wanted to have a conversation maybe with someone that you were chatting with here in the session you could just go to the lounge right now and start to have that we will be having our next session starting in just about five minutes it's a panel on digital literacies. And so hope you'll tune in for that and we're here all week right we're starting every day noon eastern running till for the official program and then four to five we're having a social hour where you get to bring your favorite annotation and talk about it in the crowd. So thank you Courtney. Thank you all thanks for having me.