TONY RINALDO
read, and torn off utility poles in modern cities, leaving a “tangled crosshatch” of empty staples. “It’s impossible to know who takes the notes down or, indeed, who has taken note,” Gitelman observed. In contrast, Peter Burke, an emeritus professor of cultural history at the University of Cambridge, cited examples of extraordinary notes, such as those inscribed on clay tablets in ancient Rome, that have survived the ages and now reside in museum collections. The panel moderator, Harvard Divinity School professor David D. Hall, referred to the richness of notes that have been preserved in Harvard’s libraries and other collections of ephemera, despite the “vast amount of bills of credit, money, forms, and almanacs which simply have vanished from the archive of print.” The conference opened with the launch of a virtual exhibition of notes from Harvard’s extensive collections (http://bookhistory.harvard. edu/takenote) and featured a half-day of field trips to the libraries and museums that contributed to the online display. (See page 12.) “Catching thoughts on the wing” was Burke’s poetic description of the experience of studying the notes of distinguished scholars from the past, bringing to mind the Radcliffe dean and social historian Lizabeth Cohen’s re-
Jeffrey Schnapp, who moderated the panel on digital annotation tools, took a photograph that he posted on Twitter. Schnapp is a professor of Romance languages and literature, director of the metaLAB, and director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.
marks at the beginning of the conference, when she called notes “the tracks we leave in the sand as we head toward our ultimate goal of discovery, publication, or policy.” Although the panelists were drawn from diverse institutions and academic fields, they shared the perception that notes are artifacts of creative thought. As Ann Blair, a conference co-organizer and the senior advisor to Radcliffe’s humanities program, observed, notes “offer unique insights into the content and methods of thinking of previous generations.” The impact of the digital age on note-taking was the focus of a panel moderated by the Harvard professor Jeffrey Schnapp, the director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Schnapp said, “The process
of designing tools for the future practices of notation is connected to ideas we have about the cognitive role of notes.” David Karger, a professor of computer science at MIT, shared his experience developing NB, an innovative software program that, he said, “turns annotation into a synchronous collaborative discussion.” A next generation of online discussion forums, NB enables students to read, comment, and ask professors or classmates questions about assignments in real time, on shared PDFs. A key advantage of the tool, Karger said, is the facilitation of peer learning. Bob Stein, the founder and a codirector of the Institute for the Future of the Book, observed that putting texts in browsers gives us the advantage of one another’s
intelligence. “The power of multiple points of view focused on a text—not about a text, but in a text—is incredibly exciting,” he said. The University of Washington professor David Levy left participants to ponder the question “If we now have the most remarkable tools for scholarship and learning the world has ever known, how is it that we have less time to think than ever before?” The driving force behind technology development has been a “more, better, faster” mentality. The challenge scholarly note-takers will face in the future, Levy predicted, is the tension between the power and speed of technology and the imperative to read and think deeply. Deborah Blagg is a freelance writer.
Winter 2013 r a d c l i f f e m a g azine
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