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it is my great pleasure um to welcome our first keynote of uh ine8 2021 courtney mcclellan courtney is the current innovator in residence at the library of congress in
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washington d.c and she has a long history of making art and sculpture and thinking socially at the intersection of media and civic life and most recently she's been thinking a lot about annotation
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um which is why she's here and she's going to share that with thinking with us today courtney the floor is yours thank you so much i appreciate the invitation to speak here at hypothesis and i want to further thank
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hypothesis scholar and residents remy colier for making this connection and i'm just thrilled to speak with you all today what i sort of thought i would do today is is introduce myself just a touch more
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but focus on talking about contemporary artists using annotation because that's what i am i'm a studio artist and then the bulk of the time we'll spend talking about the development of my library in congress innovator and residence experiment speculative
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annotation which will launch this july so in just a few short weeks again just sort of a follow-up of that introduction so i'm a visual research based artist
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and i live in atlanta georgia my work covers a range of media including sculpture performance photography and writing and the project i made for the innovator in residence program is the first
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web-based application i've ever made in subject my work often addresses speech and civic engagement and i've served as a studio art faculty at virginia commonwealth university the university of georgia georgia state university
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um i have my mfa from tufts university and most recently i was the 2019-2020 roman jaywit artist in residence at the university of michigan so just a little bit about the innovator
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in residence experiment and program so as i said my project is called speculative annotation the program at large is a creative research residency funded by the library
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of congress labs and innovators such as myself work with library of congress collections and staff to create a short-term experimental public project in this case a public art project that intends to reach the work life and
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imagination of the american people so in order to kind of start thinking about annotation and sort of how i became interested in annotation i think it's important to think about how contemporary artists are using annotation
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um it's a trend that i've seen in the last oh certainly five or six years but probably reaches much farther back and i've seen many artists using annotation in their practice
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and so i thought i'd share just a couple of artists that i think are using it in interesting ways and this will really just be a brief touch on them so hopefully if you're interested you can follow up more about their work but i wanted to give just a little bit
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of context so this first artist i'm sharing is bethany collins bethany collins is an artist living in chicago and makes work about the intersection of race and language
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collins regularly responds to historical documents songs and literature collins uses annotation in one form or another in almost all of her work and in this case i'm showing an example
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of colin's erasure series in which she erases printed text using a black magic eraser so that much of the text is unreadable
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um so it's really kind of leaving behind just some kind of uh trace of language uh and then sort of highlighting certain aspects of the text i think this work is particularly that
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she did a series about the uh the odyssey another artist using annotation is wendy redstar wendy redstar is a multi-disc
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multi-disciplinary artist who in this case created a series of annotations for an exhibition at mass moca in north adams massachusetts this particular annotation is an
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annotation of an elder in her tribe um and so this is an annotation of medicine man so a little bit about wendy redstar so raised on a crow reservation in montana
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wendy redstar is work and this comes directly from her website is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression including photography sculpture video fiber arts and performance
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an avid researcher of archives and historical narratives red star seeks to incorporate and recast her research offering new and unexpected perspectives and work that is at once inquisitive witty and
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unsettling the last artist that i would just touch on today to think about annotation is laura owens um and so laura owens is primarily a painter but in some ways especially with the topic thinking about social annotation i
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thought owens was a great example as part of her mid-career survey exhibition at the whitney museum of american art in new york uh owens created a series of emojis that
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could be downloaded by attendees and so this you can see on the right is the emoji palette that she created so that people could annotate uh each other's language with her you know unique and specific emojis
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and these could be downloaded and used um on the premises at the whitney but also at large so these were things that sort of left the gallery jumped off the wall and existed in people's kind of social annotation life
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of of communication so i think this brings up kind of one broad question and i certainly don't intend to speak for all artists but mostly to kind of touch on an idea about why artists might be interested in annotation or why
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artists annotate in many ways it's the same reason scholars journalists and scientists annotate to share opinion to record information to provide context or to react to the
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archive annotation is also a form of reframing or protest and offers the ability to draw attention to resonant passages or ideas in addition to written text as a form of
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annotation artists also have other tools at their disposal to share information so some of these tools will kind of look at a little bit later but something like line quality so how the line is made is it thick is it then does it kind of
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wiggle does it um gesture in some ways color choice the ability to collage and or a way to layer images so in thinking about me specifically as
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i was looking at these other artists and found uh so much inspiration and how they were using annotation um i realized that i was less interested in how i might annotate something and more interested in how
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others annotate i'm somebody who has always loved finding notes in library books and who finds you know fascinating kind of pieces of detritus on the street that
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have text on and that people have shared grocery lists et cetera and so i particularly began thinking about how other people annotated and how we might be able to facilitate that through a project with the library of congress
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so i was particularly thinking about students and teachers as an audience for for many reasons both because i think they could actively use the tool and also because i think uh there
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sometimes are an underserved art audience so i wanted to think about how i might stage a space for them to annotate historical material and primary sources from the libraries congress so just a little bit to kind of
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articulate exactly what speculative annotation is speculative annotation is an open source dynamic web application and public art project the tool presents a unique mini collection
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of free to use items from the library of congress for students teachers and users of all ages to annotate through captions drawings and other types of mark making working with curators of the library and students and teachers in the classroom i
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developed speculative annotation to provide a way for students to speak back to history speculative annotation connects items from the past with the day-to-day experience of users it was made with a k-12 audience in mind
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with the hope that the primary sources from the library's collections would be used by educators the items are shared with contextual aids including curators annotations and links to additional resources for further research on the library's
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website the tool as i said will launch this july and i wanted to go ahead and note a few important people to the project so speculative annotation really wouldn't have been possible without a team
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i am not a developer and so that was one of the kind of important things to build a team so to uh to facilitate the creation of this project and of course everyone was inputting on creative choices
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as well as technical ones so other people i wanted to kind of highlight are jamie mayer senior senior innovation specialist at the lc labs adam arling who was the developer for the project jess
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vue who was our ux consultant and olivia graham who is a graphic design intern so just to kind of touch on why we call it speculative annotation and why that was important so for me um i have been defining the
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speculation and annotation as the following speculation is engaging in or projecting on to future events it's theorizing and imagining without knowing in our case we're thinking of annotation simply as a note of explanation or
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comment added to a text or diagram so examples include margin notes highlighting and thought bubbles and we'll see examples of all those in the tool an additional question is why think about speculative
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that's sort of been an ongoing conversation and certainly was important to the inspiration of the project so when thinking about speculative annotation the tool enables students to analyze and examine historical materials
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through hands-on engagement history is an enduring mystery speculation is a form of investigation this tool allows students to question and examine the point of view of the creators of primary sources
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in response students annotations are an interpretation we're asking students to make their insights visible and in doing so join history's record so that's kind of one important factor is that we're wanting students to develop some
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visual literacy skills in using the tool and we want them to find value and let them know that we find value in their uh joining history's record speculative is also a reference to
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speculative fiction a term that covers fantasy to science fiction while the presentation is going to focus on the topic of annotation the essay i selected to annotate to annotate speaks the topics of
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speculation and imagination it is from science fiction writer ursula k lewin's introduction to the left hand of darkness and this is an essay that i have thoroughly enjoyed and have used in many contexts i hope you will annotate it
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with consideration for how leguin sees through the relationship between the past present and future as well as the role of the artist in relation to this interpreting this particular topic so some goals we set out for speculative
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annotation and i'll say that my residency started in september and it's a year-long residency so these were sort of goals we articulated very early on into the project and tried to kind of keep on returning
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to when we were making design decisions and choices along the way we wanted to place k-12 students in direct conversation with primary sources from the libraries collection
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we wanted to share these items with context for example asking curators and experts to annotate the items so students and educators can understand their history and i'll return to that particular goal because that was one of the biggest
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changes in design decisions we made we wanted to provide a space for users of all ages to have a depth of experience with individual items from the collection we wanted to connect items from history with the day-to-day experience of
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citizens and application users and we wanted to explore technical solutions for supporting deep engagement with the singular item across formats at the library so i'll say that's another kind of difference here is that many of the previous so
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there have been three previous innovators and residents and most of them they have done projects dealing with large data sets and so this was a slightly different project we were selecting individual items
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to try to inspire deep engagement with students so i'm going to show a brief video of just uh what the tool looks like and kind of demoing a small annotation
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so as you can see here there's a toolbar to the left there is the ability to save and download at the top you can also access some of your saved annotations in the top right if you're working on something
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and one of the goals we set out is to make things very simple that was something early on we heard from students to have kind of simple choices as not to make something so complicated so there's a text tool
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there's a drawing tool a highlighting tool a shape tool to kind of isolate aspects of an image and then the stamps so students can jump right in to
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starting to annotate there's a limited color palette at the top so some of this was to and we kind of kept on going back to how is this an annotation tool not necessarily a design tool although
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it employs visual cues and material and hopefully is visually engaging and the item we're looking at that's being annotated is the telegram
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from aaron copeland who is a composer so that was a large portion of our time and i'll talk about that in a bit about even just selecting items that we think would be exciting and viable for
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classroom users to use so it's not a tool where they can pick anything on the library site but instead currently there's a subset of about 40 items that people can select from to annotate
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and there were some kind of technical limitations about the tool so again that's partially why it can't be used across the entire loc wide there were sort of limitations it was
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also that we couldn't have a server so everything is accessible and saved in the browser and then we're looking at the metadata panel right now and then there's also the
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staff annotation which i'll talk about later so that's just a very basic demo and introduction to the tool itself so the process of creating speculative
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annotation um it was a highly collaborative and creative process and throughout the process my team and i conducted three kinds of research the first being studio experimentation
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and design the second being collaborative curation of the speculative annotation mini collection with library staff and lastly the user testing class visits with students and educators
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so a little bit about the studio experimentation um i wanted to stage a space where students felt value with a conversation about shared history so part of me was trying to do this to make this visually
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appealing to give them a freedom to respond in the ways they'd be interested in and also to provide them hopefully with some interesting tools in preparation for this i worked in a print making studio to explore mark
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making and printing processes in order to consider annotation as an artistic medium monoprinting and collage particularly inform the tool and can be seen in the hand-cut stamps so one of the things that's sort of i
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think most unique about the tool is that there's a series of hand cut stamp stamps that i cut myself that students can use to code or layer or encode by that i mean like add
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uh you know exclamation points add stars to things that they're interested in use them as kind of visual cues in the actual active annotating so i wanted the application to feel
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touched and handmade even in its digital format so that was another thing is thinking again about my love of finding notes in library books was this was partially to make something feel touched and unique and personal these
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principles guided many visual choices in the resulting site along with my team we designed tools and features in speculative annotation to contrast the visually to visually contrast the archival
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material presented in the mini collection the color palette was inspired by colors regularly used for annotation like fluorescent highlighter yellow diverging from the muted colors of many of the aged artifacts and allowing for
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annotations to be highly visible many of the stamp forms like an arrow or a pointing finger also allow users to draw attention to particular aspects of the historical items while thought bubbles and punctuation
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marks offer a way to share ideas opinions and emotional reactions the curation of the mini collection this was where i would say a large portion of our time went um working with curators library staff
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and field experts we developed the mini collection in parallel with the creation of the speculative annotation website library curators provide a host of contemporaneous examples of historical annotation from the collection
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rosenwald and rare book curators for example shared that medieval manuscript materials that included ample margin space with the expectation that scholars would add their own notes at the time books were rare and
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expensive to create and scholars would often travel to a manuscript and document their findings directly in the same book these historical examples of annotation influence the layout of the tool for example the need for extra space
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around an item to allow for such annotation library staff also proposed works to be included in the speculative annotation mini collection through conversation with experts from around the library several key themes
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related to storytelling and imagination emerged among the items and that was again part of that speculative question how do we invite storytelling and imagination through the tools and through the items um the
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topics that covered and regularly addressed these concerns included civil and human rights the creative process and technological development we worked with 12 different divisions at
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the library to create this collection for students and teachers and so much of our time was sort of talking about to them about their needs finding out um what might in their collections might be a standalone item that could be
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engaging and inspiring to students and educators we did user testing and again that's sort of one of those things where from my kind of perspective i thought about it a lot as like community outreach but we were also
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of course doing user testing to find out what students and teachers um might want from a tool and how they might utilize it um so that was sort of a big part of the efforts particularly last fall
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even into the spring where i was visiting classes while we were carrying out these other kinds of research and right now we're looking at the list of classes that i visited which we would not have been able to
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create this tool without their engagement and support and particularly i'm thankful to them during a a really challenging and difficult teaching year
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um i virtually visited classes throughout the development of the tool these visits began with sharing the library's free to use digital collection and asking students to annotate them with the applications with which they were already familiar
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we learned from the writings and drawing students made and listened to their advice about what they wanted when the tool was prototyped students and educators tested the site giving feedback and brainstorming solutions to
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educational and technical challenges for instance students shared that they most often hand annotated with a highlighter so a highlighter was added to the toolbar they also wanted to be able to zoom deeper into images
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allowing for a more detailed view of a given item finally students suggested ways to make the tool more user-friendly for example they requested that the text tool be contained within a bounding box
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allowing students to write longer annotations that could wrap to multiple lines speculative annotation aims to foster visual literacy and interpretation of primary sources across subjects the tool is informed by methods of
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historical analysis literary close reading and studio art critique and i think that brings up something important you know you can see here the classes we visited we didn't want to make a tool that was
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just for history classes we thought that these primary sources had need and had utility in art classes in photography classes in language arts
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classes so that was really important to the the practice and visit to that how do we make a tool that is flexible enough that it could be used in an elementary school language arts
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class and in a high school ap government class potentially so i'm going to share just a couple of examples of student annotations these were some of the ones we collected and
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we studied and learned from and we did receive special permission to show this work of minor so we did go through that process
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and again just simply by having them share these with us we were really engaged with what they wanted what they used what was exciting to them how might the tool
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uh be transformed and of course as i already said they gave some really concrete and useful uh feedback as well as sharing these annotations with us
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i know is the topic and thinking about the hypothesis tool about the social annotation i did want to address that in this talk um so currently students cannot co-annotate on speculative annotation
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simultaneously that was something again that was limited by our inability to have a server so although students cannot edit edit the same item on separate devices in real time they can
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share so they can download and share these annotations one another and their teachers um it could be a direct email it lives in a png file or it could be um sharing using hashtag
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annotate loc and that's something uh that we hope we'll see people activating we also hope the teachers can share their tools and resources and ways they've used speculative annotation
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in a similar manner in the most simple and direct way we do hope that people teachers might be willing and thinking about modeling the annotation for students um so the biggest addition and i think
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it was sort of i to be my favorite addition to the tool as we've been working on it is uh lc staff annotations um so i think i noted in the demonstration that there was a small button on the lower left
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hand or a button that was orange that said lc staff annotation and as we were talking to staff and you know as i mentioned kind of speaking to the 12 divisions we were working with
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we regularly heard concerns about how to provide context and rather than seeing that as a problem i really saw that as an opportunity so uh you can see that there's always a metadata panel to provide
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very straightforward information about who made it where it was made when it was made and there was also links to kind of additional research students and teachers could use um but i thought it would be interesting and to provide a way
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to have some personal um understanding of of annotations from the curators themselves so i think this provided a couple of things one it's a model of how the annotations might look and what they might be used for
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but i also think it's a way to kind of put students not just in conversation with history but conversation with library staff and so uh and in fact this for me was inspired by
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a project uh that was created um at the isabella stewart gardner in which a contemporary artist asked staff and uh security guards to describe
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the famously missing paintings so i wanted a staff at the library to spend some time describing and looking at the tool looking at the items that's from their area and annotating them
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so it was sort of a great joy and we asked them to annotate with several topics in mind so one it could be providing additional historical context it could be telling a personal narrative it could be asking questions for
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students to respond to but about half of the items in our collection have these unique lc staff annotations that students can can access so this one i'm sharing right now is an annotation
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of a rosenwald manuscript material that we were including in the selection by curator stephanie stillow and i also just love how wonderfully visual it is this is an annotation of a photograph of
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the pecan sheller strike by maria guadalupe pardita and this annotation was another kind of great addition and enriching lupita who's we're describing here uh
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also also created a podcast associated with this tool so we wanted to kind of uh engage the students and and the story that she was telling and then hopefully they'll go listen to the podcast she
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created also so it's also a way i think of hopefully kind of drawing people into the the larger story of each item in the collection and lastly this is an annotation of a patsy mink manuscript material
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done by liz novara so this these annotations i i hope will really enrich the project and also um kind of exist as gems to find in the tool itself
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before leaving i wanted to give an additional thanks to adam arlington vu and olivia graham who were integral to this and i want to give additional thanks to jamie mayers the lc labs team dr remy collier and antaro garcia uh
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emily kirkpatrick the national council of english teachers cleanastasiac printmaker and joss hadrow and the team at triple i f these all these were all people who were vital to this project in addition to the area specialists
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and the many teachers who who gave their time and resources and students to engage the project along the way and from here i'm going to invite you to
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annotate on the selected at uh text which is again the introduction essay to the left hand of darkness by ursula kayla quinn and i'm also available for questions
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are there any questions i can answer hey yes courtney i've been kind of monitoring the chat and the questions that they come through and thank you so much for that presentation
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it's really refreshing to step away from the textual and really immerse ourselves in the visual um a couple of questions here and then maybe we could move over to the um the reading that you've selected
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for annotation um let's start out um actually with one of alex's questions if there were i can show it on the stage actually if there were unexpected uses of the
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tool subverting it for other needs making the tool their own and making it appropriate for their contacts did you does that resonate with you as something that happened during the project so i'm wanting to make sure i understand
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the question so i think there's been one thing were the students subverting the um the tool so there's one thing is that the only way to use the tool is to use items from the library's collection so it's not a space where somebody could
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upload an additional image so they can't annotate something extra the tool itself is open source so we're hoping that other cultural heritage institutions might want to reuse the tool in another
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context and so that's sort of one one intention and hope in the larger process craig young and alex did confirm that you had uh
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anticipated his meaning right okay good um and i will say that i see that jamie mars the senior innovation specialist that i work with is in the chat and answering probably some of the technical questions um
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also invite jamie up on stage if that would be helpful jamie do you want to do that are you just going to field questions in the chat she'll have to respond okay maybe uh while she's thinking about that
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um we could uh another question from chris aldrich and i'll again show it on the stage here does the tool have a way for students to take their annotations
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or data with them perhaps to put in a notebook commonplace book for future thought review or building upon so the one place so uh again because it doesn't have a server
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there's no way of like logging back on to a different computer however the information does uh stay on uh you know and within the kind of browser that it's in so for instance in my case
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i have many saved annotations that i can pull up because i'm reusing my same laptop so you can re-access those as long as you haven't cleared your cache however there's not currently a space that you would sign on again like i said
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from a different location and be able to access another annotation got it and um actually your colleague did say that they would be willing to come up on stage so i'm going to see if
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i can make that happen as well give me a second here hi i'm not very camera ready i'm like literally in overalls um like responding people's chats but i am
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i am happy to answer um there's some like technical questions about accessibility that i can happily speak to i saw several of them and i was trying to answer like one by one but it might be easier if i just share it here
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but only if that's helpful i can continue to do it in the chat whatever you guys want to share jamie i put this one question up on stage so people can see the context yeah so um the library of congress when
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it produces applications in um in production they have to be section 508 compliant my team in lc labs has a different workflow because we're an r d like part
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of the library and so we create like fast build prototypes to test a concept to see how popular it is with the public and we do this through a number of ways um but one of them
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is through um art projects and that we sponsor such as hosting residents like courtney so hopefully that helps for context so spico vanitation is an experiment it's produced as such
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um we host it for a short amount of time so it'll be hosted by the library for two years um and then if the library decides to adopt it and to put it into production then it um goes through the
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process you know as required by a federal institution with 508 compliance etc um so hopefully that helps for context because i don't think that that is um you know apparent especially because the application certainly doesn't look like
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a prototype it's beautiful um so that's one thing i saw and then um another one is i was saying this in the chat but in case like people didn't see it because i was typing it fast
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so um there are several colors from the color palette that that do have accessibility compliance and it's a little bit more complicated because there's a light mode and a dark mode so there's colors that have accessibility compliance like based on what
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the background mode is and there's also um tags for the tools so that's there but i in general because the tool is so heavily visual no it hasn't been tested with a screen
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reader and the tool is open source and we would absolutely love it if anyone um had feedback or wanted to fork it and had ways that they thought that the tool could be
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more accessible like you know in the short amount of time um that we're hosting it so we did a dance basically we kind of do with all these experiments where
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we made it so that it could be accessible you know with the resources that we had and then if the library chooses to adopt it which we really hope it does it's been pretty amazing so far and it seems to be useful but can't say for sure what the organization
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will do um then it will meet all of the requirements before it goes live live as a permanent tool that was great so thanks for being willing to join us on
00:35:04
this for the moment here actually pop on the stage um that looks like there might be one other question from mark and then maybe we could turn over to um doing some annotation on on your selected
00:35:16
text courtney um so i'm going to put it on stage uh uh and this is from mark what if you could have a server and what if there was a button to save annotation dot png an image file to the internet
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archive have you imagined what it might be like to actually save these artifacts digitally so i'll try to answer and then jamie if you have a different
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thought on this um i mean so the biggest desire we've had for a server is so that it could be more of a social annotation so that students could be on the same image and be writing and also that they could share
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share them more easily that way so that's sort of a long-term dream we haven't gone heavily down that path because of limited expectations because it's a government institution about
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collecting personal data and so we've always known that not having a serper was one of the limitations but of course if somebody else was using it or if um there was another way to kind of manage this the thought that
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students could co-annotate or that a teacher could have you know every sort of it's you know in many ways what's uh fun about a hypothesis that people could be all in one image together and be sharing ideas um
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so we love that possibility we just know that currently that's not feasible jamie and i'll add one thing yeah add one thing to that which is that um
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we um spent money courtney spent money and we spent money um and did a lot of extra work with our developers so that actually the architecture for this to be set up with a server is all in place it's just that as a part of the context
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that i was giving before that this is a prototype that we don't use servers with the experiments that we launched that's something that will happen later um you know if the library chooses to support it as a permanent app and it goes into production um then
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it'll put resources into that and setting up all of the you know best practices for how to store pii or not et cetera so that's just a part of the technical constraints of of this
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um particular project um but the architecture is there and it was really fun i mean if folks are interested it seems like they are in some of the technical aspects the way that the tool works and has been
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set up for simultaneous annotation and this includes layering between the curator annotations you know being able to layer on top of those or layer you know having students in the same classroom layer
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their annotations on top of each other the architecture set up in the json manifest file incredibly lightweight without pii so that basically if there was a server i don't know if this is interesting to people but i'm just going to share it
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that essentially the app is set up so that those markings um are packed into a json file without pii and so your server is essentially hosting this really really lightweight json file
00:38:14
and then it just recalls it back or recalls like multiple ones to layer so the the architecture is adam marling our developer is amazing and he set up a really
00:38:28
eloquent like solution for this that would be really kind of sustainable and lightweight for any organization to host so if there are folks out there that would like to use speculative annotation in that way it's really lightweight
00:38:40
and then we also heard from folks as well i love the idea of internet archive as a way of archiving things and the other thing i was going to say was that we also had some suggestions
00:38:52
about using github as a way of acting as a server affordance so if you were a github user you know this this app could be something that you could connect to your
00:39:04
github repo and it would store your annotation manifest files like within your own repo for you to recall them again and use them in the tool um so that's how it's set up and i hope that was easy
00:39:16
i think it was there's a lot of um really deep technical geeks here in the in the audience and they're already grouping on that um so thanks for sharing that um if uh as we move over to the essay um
00:39:28
if someone here wanted to maybe get involved in a technical level or start to think about this what how might they how might they do that is there a way for for citizens to to get involved
00:39:41
oh my gosh please please do we it is a lot of overhead for us to um uh get things published in a public like library of congress github repo
00:39:54
because obviously it needs to be scanned and everything so that we're not accidentally passing you know bugs like to folks who want to fork it or package it so we do a lot of work we put a lot of resources into making sure these tools
00:40:07
are open source and that is exactly what we would like to see i mean we would like for you to get involved i'll be one of the repo managers there'll be other people on the lab staff um we would love issues push
00:40:21
we'd love to see people forking this we would love to see people using this in different contexts i saw chats about you know if someone wanted to set it up like using um
00:40:32
github as a repo like in the architecture that i was describing um please do and there's other ways that you can get in touch um with us at lc labs on twitter
00:40:46
we're a technical team at the library we love hosting conversations about the experiments that we put out so that's one way and we also have a newsletter that you can sign up to and you can find that
00:40:57
information at labs.lock.gov and then once the tool launches in july courtney is going to be doing a road show at a bunch of different venues and we would love to do some type of community twitter chat
00:41:11
so um maybe there's a way for people um in the hypothesis community to get involved in that great those all sound like really really good ways to get involved there's a lot of people here who
00:41:24
spend a lot of time on get get forms of different kinds not only github but others too um well one of the reasons i wanted to invite courtney to come back and kind of close this now because one of the reasons that um
00:41:37
we're working with this uh virtual manifestation of i annotate to um have um readings associated with sessions so that the conversation can actually start to happen
00:41:50
maybe even before the session during the session and then continue on after so it's actually okay if we don't have a whole lot of time now to do any kind of synchronous annotation but if we would courtney maybe we could
00:42:02
just um introduce the idea to them and maybe i'll share my screen so i can show it up here on the screen uh give me one just one second here and then i will um also uh ask you to
00:42:14
explain why you picked this um this document and the first thing i just wanted to let people know is that um in the
00:42:27
in the external program uh for this conference there's a program built into air meets the platform that we're meeting in that where you can see the schedule and get to things but there's a web document outside of the um
00:42:40
outside of the uh platform where every uh session is listed and then as we get the session details for each one there will be a link to that and so um if i navigate now you'll see the session
00:42:55
details for for courtney's uh session here today and you'll see that she has um a place for an annotated reading which is actually this excerpt from ursula k lewin's left hand
00:43:07
of darkness and so would you and i'll just say that you can open the hypothesis sidebar and you can see ah heather stains has already started to annotate on an unknown a known per known annotator um but you can sign up
00:43:19
or and or log into your hypothesis account um right from there so courtney would you explain why you picked this text to focus um well knowing the audience i i thought that the talk itself was going to focus a lot
00:43:32
on the idea of annotation um but i didn't want the term speculative to get lost in the mix and so for me this is an essay that really introduces um you know ursula kayla gwen is often gonna use the term science fiction but i would
00:43:45
kind of suggest that we're speaking about a more kind of broad speculative fiction too um and thinking about uh what speculation does and so this is a writer who writes fiction talking about
00:43:58
the utility of speculating imagining thinking about the past and the future and the way they relate to one another which is of course the hope here that students will annotate the past and it will help them imagine
00:44:10
the future so it's sort of this this time travel goal um this uh kind of poetic text that is also still very i think accessible and concrete and it's a text that i love and that i have taught in in many
00:44:24
contexts and often like coming back to so hopefully it will be an enjoyable read that will help kind of uh inspire uh some interesting thoughts about speculation imagination
00:44:37
the past the future and certainly was integral into me uh proposing and creating speculative annotations so this is sort of an inspiration text i would say that's great and we can see people
00:44:50
already doing that and so we invite everyone throughout the conference to come back to these documents and um continue the conversation there we can have a lot of ineffable chat here in the conference venue itself but when we have it out on these
00:45:03
documents with annotation it'll uh it'll actually have a more lasting quality to it well i really want to thank you courtney for being here today and kicking off this conference is just fantastic to hear what you're doing and your thoughts on
00:45:16
other artists that work is there anything that you'd like to kind of leave us with as a parting gift as we head on to the rest of the conference i mean hopefully the text itself will will do some of that but really with this idea about how
00:45:28
annotation uh is visual as well as information it is artistic um in any format the way the text you choose the way it's laid out there's information in that kind of method too and so
00:45:40
um i would just sort of encourage everybody to keep on thinking about how annotation uh is is a artistic artful gesture as well as a information educational informative gesture and that
00:45:53
those two things can fit together beautifully so hopefully we'll see more of that well uh thank you so much for being here i'm sure we'll see um all sorts of
00:46:04
emojis flying across the screen here good chat chat going on on there is a little emoji button on the bottom that you can use to send little signals to the screen which is a form of annotation as well um i'll just let everybody know that you
00:46:16
can also visit the lounge area here in air meet and you can actually meet up you can sit down on a table and meet with other people so if you wanted to have a conversation maybe with someone that you were chatting with here in the session you could just go to the lounge right now and start to have that
00:46:29
we will be having our next session starting in just about five minutes it's um a panel on digital literacies uh and so we hope you'll tune in for that um and we're here all week right we're starting every day
00:46:41
noon eastern running till uh four the official program and then four to five we're having a social hour where you get to bring your favorite annotation and talk about it in the crowd so thank you courtney
00:46:52
thank you all thanks for having me
End of transcript