About this course
Welcome to “Why Annotate?” This course explores the theory, practice, and significance of annotating documents. Annotation is one of the most important aspects of historical and critical editing because it provides a variety of explanatory and contextual tools to help readers understand the texts you plan to publish. In this course, you’ll explore not only different types of annotation but also the ways that annotation differs between print and digital formats.
What you'll learn
- to demonstrate the value and functions of annotation as editorial contributions to your historical documents.
- to distinguish between scholarly and critical annotation.
- to articulate the key forms of apparatus.
- to identify places in a text that require annotation.
- to compare print and digital annotation.
Additional Resources
Charles Cullen. “Principles of Annotation in Editing Historical Documents; or, How to Avoid Breaking the Butterfly on the Wheel of Scholarship,” in Literary and Historical Editing, ed. by George L. Vogt and John Bush Jones (University of Kansas Libraries, 1981). https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/5883/libseries.num46.pdf;sequence=1
Julia Nantke and Frederik Schlupkothen, editors. Annotations in Scholarly Editions and Research: Functions, Differentiation, Systematization (De Gruyter, 2020) https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110689112
Ronald Schuchard, “Yeats's Letters, Eliot's Lectures: Toward a New Focus on Annotation,” Text, vol. 6 (1994), pp. 287–306.
