Sunday Feature: A Passion for Annotations

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Sunday Feature: New Generation Thinkers: A Passion for Annotations

New Generation Thinkers: A Passion for Annotations

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Dr Kylie Murray explains her fascination for annotation.

Dr Kylie Murray illustrates her enthusiasm for textual annotations and argues that they're as important in the digital world as they've ever been.

When Dr Kylie Murray started annotating her school textbooks, it was done with the zeal and enthusiasm of a young scholar getting to grips with the wisdom of the ages. But since then she's come to treasure the annotations of others, particularly the ones that appear in the medieval manuscripts she studies. In this short feature Kylie introduces us to some of them, including Johnny Hamyll whose tough existence as a minster of the Protestant church might have faded from history were it not for his annotations of his copy of Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy. Johnny was once the victim of a summons from his local community in Auchterarder in Perthshire for 'dinging and crewall hurting' but he survives unscathed in the notes and comments of what was clearly a favourite book.

Kyle meets more textual ghosts in the virtual company of Julie Gardham and Robert MaClean of the Library of the University of Glasgow, and she talks to Dr April Pierce of the Oxford Marginalia Facebook Page who celebrates the fact that annotating is alive and well in the digital age.  And not only that, because of the wonders of technology it can be done without harming original texts or manuscripts.  April is a teacher and she recognises annotations as a sure fire way to identify that her students are engaging with texts rather than absorbing them uncritically.

Producer: Tom Alban

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