One of the reasons that I still default to pencil and paper for a lot of my sense-making writing is that I write my thoughts and an ongoing commentary on them at the same time. I annotate a lot. My marginalia is huge.
I’m enjoying the blogging that I’ve been doing, but I’m not enjoying that each blog post is such a static thing once written. Actually I’m finding it pretty frustrating. I want to be able to revisit a post and annotate it with additional thoughts – to note other sources of more info, to make links to other things, or to generally add another layer of critique. I don’t want to change the post itself, just to be able to continue overlaying more thoughts to it as time passes.
Ideally I’d like to be able to do this within WordPress itself, so that I don’t loose that stuff should an external service suddenly disappear. The layer of commentary and marginalia is as vital to me as the main body of the thing.
I’ve had a look at inline comments on WordPress and generally solutions seem to be a reworking of the existing comments functionality on the platform – which isn’t what I want because I still want other people to be able to add comments (actually I want to be able to annotate them too – I’m greedy like that).
So far I haven’t found a good solution, so I’ve signed up for Hypothes.is and installed the plugin on my site so that I have something at least. I’m continuing to be brave and I’ve made my annotations public so others shouldn’t need to login to see them. Let’s see how well this works…
(Image from French textiles from Maison Robert, by Victor Ducroquet; 1863; Paris via the Public Domain Review. Image is in the public domain. )
Hi Anne Marie -I often feel the same.I always think I press the publish button too soon and should wait an hour for that vital missing bit to pop into my head. Will be interested to hear how you get on with hypothis
That’s an interesting point Sheila – why aren’t we more comfortable with revising our own content when we have the inevitable lightbulb moment later? It belongs to us after all. (I’m increasingly convinced that the Publish button is actually an epiphany trigger – the moment you click it the countdown starts).
I tend to make notes alongside what I write as I go to remind me of the little connections to other things that I might come back and explore later – or to record why I came to an assumption. Years ago I wrote an essay on digital citizenship in this style – using a pretty basic HTML table – it was laborious and so I never did it again. I’d really like to find a good way to do this digitally otherwise most of my musings will stay in analogue form. I should make a note to report back on whether this new experiment works out or not!