Playing the Margins
February 12, 2011
Although I spent a long part of my life objecting to any sort of writing in books, my work on the de la Mare Library, which is dependent on his annotations fo much of its methodology, has converted me to the virtues of marginalia. So I am particularly delighted that two of our MA LIS students, Paris O’Donnell and Sian Prosser, have been awarded funding through UCL’s Train and Engage scheme to investigate actors’ and drama students’ use of annotation in their work. From our news page:
Sian and Paris have taken our optional modules on Historical Bibliography and Digital Resources in the Humanities, and they will be using their skills and developing their research interests in these areas through this project. I’m really interested to hear their findings regarding actors’ notetaking, and if / how digital technology like ereaders and tablet PCs have made an impact in that community so far.
Image: Margo Conner (copyright commons, some rights reserved
This sounds like a really interesting project. I’d naturally assume that actors and drama students would have a similar attitude to musicians regarding annotations: scribble early, scribble often. It’s quite interesting the way that marginalia in printed books is often frowned upon, but that it’s taken as a given that musicians will write all over their parts, including those that are only hire copies.
As Hilary Jackson points out, our attitude that prefers clean copies of books unless the annotator is famous, is a relatively modern construct – Erasmus encouraged students to write in texts and right up till the nineteenth century people wrote in their books and shared them in their social circle as part of communication.
I like your music analogy – have come across music texts owned in shared contexts (like choirs) that have been heavily annotated although it was the shared ownership of (text) books through schools and libraries that Jackson credits as a big contributor to the preference of the clean text.
We’re really looking forward to seeing if Sian and Paris’s work confirms or contradicts our suspicions about actors’ annotation practice …