[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 404 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, I welcome back to the show Remi Kalir, to talk about annotation is.

[00:00:13] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:22] Bonni Stachowiak: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Remi Kalir is an associate professor of Learning Design and Technology at the University of Colorado, Denver School of Education and Human Development. He researches how annotation facilitates social, collaborative, and equitable learning.

Remi is lead author along with Antero, Garcia of Annotation, the MIT Press 2021, an introduction to annotation as a genre, or a synthesis of reading, thinking, writing, and communication and its significance in scholarship and everyday life. He was the 2020/21 scholar in residence with the annotation organization hypothesis, and is also a co-founder and facilitator of the Marginal Syllabus. His research about annotation has been supported by an OER research fellowship from the Open Education Group and a National Science Foundation Data Consortium fellowship. Remi Kalir, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:54] Remi Kalir: Thank you. It is so good to see you. It is wonderful to be back.

[00:01:58] Bonni Stachowiak: You probably have heard this overused expression, but I’m going to do it anyway. The expression goes, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. [laughs]

[00:02:08] Remi Kalir: Yes, tell me about it. Tell me about it. I want the story. I want the story Bonni, what do you got for us?

[00:02:13] Bonni Stachowiak: I feel like we– I don’t know, you’ve been on the show four or five times or something and oftentimes, it relates back to annotation and since we last spoke, I felt like I had a new way of perceiving annotation around me. It has to do with our kids. I realized this after the fact, every single faucet in our home has temperature controls that are a matter of degrees, how much cold water would you like, how much hot water, with one exception. It is a treat for our children, they love to take a bath in mommy and daddy’s bath because it is quite large.

I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this, but I’m just going to let it hang out there. It may or may not even have jets. That’s what we’re talking about. [laughs] This is a very exciting bathtub, but I realized it’s the only faucet in our entire home that you have two separate faucets to control. I’ll be darned if I ever have remembered which one is hot and which one is cold. I noticed one of our children- I don’t even know when this happened. I don’t know which one it was, actually- I do know which one it was, but I’m not going to name them because I didn’t get their permission in advance.

They had gone upstairs to my office, to my label printer, didn’t ask because they’re tools that they’re allowed to use, but just had printed out a label for hot, printed out a label for cold and it’s on- and literally, it just solves the problem for the entire family. Anyone wants to take a bath, there’s no fear over which one is which. It’s very, very clear and I thought, annotation is- and that’s actually why you’re here today to talk, way more than I’ve been talking, to talk about what is annotation is, and are you seeing any annotation in new … ways in your life?

[00:04:01] Remi Kalir: Oh, Bonni, that story is so fantastic. First of all, thank you for inviting me back. I love your story. Folks may or may not know that last year, I published a book with my dear friend and colleague on Antero Garcia called Annotation as part of the MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge series. The purpose of that book is to provide a kind of broad, engaging introduction to important topics, and in our case, annotation. In crafting that book, we wanted to foreground key affordances of annotation, and the very first one that we describe is the way in which annotation provides information, and that’s a key thing that annotation does.

Annotation provides information. It’s done so for centuries. Whether it’s translating a text from one language to another, whether it’s providing instruction in some way, annotations provide information, and actually a key type of annotation then is a label, and we talk about labeling. There’s all kinds of different ways that annotation labeling occurs, and in fact, in our current “knowledge economy” there’s a lot of data labeling. In fact, data labeling powers things like AI and helps to inform all kinds of computational methods, but it can also be material, and it can be reflecting the built environment.

The fact that your child– God, as you said a labeler, made labels, printed out labels, and then put them on the built environment, added a note to a text, in this case, the text is a designed object, it’s this sink, it’s this tub, it’s got these faucets, it’s got a function, but it needs information. The act of annotation is making that information explicit. It’s providing that information to other users of that tool. I love the example.

It is so so wonderful, and again, speaks to really now what is my big passion project, which is to help people see annotation all around them, to help appreciate that annotation is an everyday literacy practice and that you, Bonni, but also you, listener, you who may come across this podcast at some point in time, you are an annotator. I really want to talk about that today.

[00:06:27] Bonni Stachowiak: You started a project– Did you start it on January 1st? Was it very–

[00:06:31] Remi Kalir: I did. Again, my work as a researcher, and as an educator is increasingly embracing annotation as a practice. In my work, again, as I talk to educators, and teachers, and other researchers, I’m consistently reminded about the idea that annotation is all around us, and that you are an annotator. As the New Year began, on January 1st, I thought, “I should start a project, where I share a little provocative entry point, a little provocative image, a little provocative something that helps people to think about annotation, and maybe to do so in new ways.”

This new project is called Annotate22, and that’s the name of the project and the name of the hashtag and every day this year, I am sharing examples of where we read and write and compose and create and contest the world around us, knowledge, information, and narrative and we do all of that through the practice of annotation or the addition of a note to a text, like a label on a faucet.

[00:07:37] Bonni Stachowiak: I am really excited that you’re going to be willing to share lots and lots of ideas with us in just a moment, and I’m going to sit back and enjoy that part of the podcast. Before we get there, though, even just hearing you talk about it- not just today, but also all the conversations we’ve had, this to me– Well, the first part of our conversation was the kind of annotation that provides information.

I know that for you, you don’t want us to stop there and I also know that for you, this has deep meaning and significance, this feels to me that it goes beyond scholarship, it goes beyond teaching. Talk a little bit about some of the deeper meanings for this work for you and what you think it can make a difference in your life, but also the lives of people really all over the world.

[00:08:28] Remi Kalir: Why, thank you. I appreciate it. I think that my journey to finding the language of annotation, and to appreciating its practice in my life has been one that’s taken many, many years. I could point to moments in my life** For example, maybe when I was studying abroad in Northern Ireland and was surrounded by murals, and all kinds of street symbols, and all kinds of ways that people in a variety of communities were marking up their built environment as expressions of identity and history and counter-narrative. I can think of those experiences– I can certainly think of my life as a literacy educator.

I began my career in a middle school classroom, in the South Bronx, in New York City. I was teaching literacy to 12-year-olds. Of course, in that context then, annotation took on a very formal, discipline-specific meaning. How we help students to comprehend the text, make meaning. Perhaps even provide feedback to their peers and annotation becomes a little bit more social. Then over the course of my training and my doctoral studies, as I began to think about digital media, and civic media, and how people use all kinds of tools and languages to really interact with one another in more, dare I say, equity-oriented or even more just ways.

I began to appreciate that there are a whole repertoire of social annotation technologies and social annotation practices that are really helping us to bring about a language of annotation that was really quite incredible. Now, I see it, as you were saying earlier in the introduction, you begin to see this everywhere you look. There are artists like Alexandra Bell, who create these large posters, where redaction and addition of words to things like a New York Times headline help to confront racial bias and stereotypes, as well as gender narratives, and literally rewrite dominant mainstream narratives around identity, in a project that in her art, she called a counter narrative.

We might look at park rangers and there was a great example just recently, who went to the signage around Muir Woods in California, and began to print out and label corrective history of really updating and fact checking the record of how particular people’s legacies are represented in narrative of place. Whether I’m looking at the news, I’m visiting a park, I’m looking at the built environment, or I’m in my classroom with my students, I’m drawing upon the practices of annotation, to help me make sense of my interactions with texts, which of course surround us all over the place, but also my interactions with other people, and how through our collaborations together, we can then relate to those texts in more authentic ways. Maybe critique those narratives in ways that are necessary, and then build new narratives that can point towards more inclusive and just learning futures.

[00:11:37] Bonni Stachowiak: When you talked about the middle school classroom, I was curious, because you talked about annotation taking on a more formal disciplinary approach. I know you well enough to know that that probably doesn’t mean what I think it means in the sense of you probably experienced your own sense of resistance against the tradition- I’m thinking, I never really grew up with the diagramming sentences.

I know enough about diagramming sentences to know that I don’t wish to ever learn that, and then I also know there’s a lot about the red pen and the psychology behind marking up every single thing that’s wrong with this and not helping people find their voice. Would you share a little bit about what you remember about annotation and how you took it and maybe wrestled with it in a different way? I’m sure there’s more to this story than just you teaching them how to diagram sentences. [laughs]

[00:12:29] Remi Kalir: Oh, absolutely. The red pen, of course, is a classic trope for many educators and perhaps many students of a certain- maybe a few generations here, that is an image that is associated with assessment, but also maybe affect, fear, failure, judgment, worth. We can see here that the practices of marking up a paper, whether that’s a teacher grading an essay, or students who are then again, doing maybe a close read of a mentor text. They may be taught conventions in doing so- again, these more formal conventions, putting an asterisk in the margin, underlining a word, circling a phrase, bracketing a term, or even a method and we see those carrying forward.

I was actually leading a professional learning workshop at a university, of course, on Zoom, but just last week, and I asked the participants, all faculty, “What are your personal histories of annotation?” One of the participating faculty members, who’s not in the humanities or in the social sciences, but is in the STEM fields, said that she had been taught a particular convention system in her high school classroom when she was a teenager that she still uses today, when marking papers in certain contexts.

Now, she was very reflective about the benefits and maybe even the drawbacks of that, but I think that many of us have some fuzzy memory, or even some very formal association with the proper way to mark up a text, even if it might be uncomfortable, or taboo in some cases, to write in a book. I’ve always been curious about that. I’ve always, to some degree resisted that and I can’t help but mention now in this context, that in this new project called Annotate22, one of the early entries I wanted to reference this history, this legacy that you’re mentioning.

The entry in this case from January 13th, so the 13th entry in this case, was an image which has gotten a lot of play online, of an essay that was written by Jacques Derrida, the famed philosopher, of course, but it was done when he was a teenager, and it includes the marked-up comments of his instructor and the grade that his instructor gave to Jacques Derrida, when he was a teenager. The quote here, among quite a few is, from the instructor, “In this essay, you seem to be constantly on the verge of something interesting, but somewhat, you always fail to explain it clearly.”

The final grade is a 10/20. Here we see this classic example, in red pen, of an instructor marking up someone who became, in some people’s opinions, a very famous philosopher. Maybe that’s a separate debate. It’s all to say, though, that those persist, those images and those practices and I think that it’s important to recognize that as annotation, so that we can appreciate if and when it is welcome, but also critique it, if it is, in this case, problematic.

[00:15:30] Bonni Stachowiak: Well, I’m going to sit back, and I’m going to let you, we are recording this interview on February the 16th so I know we will not have the full time because it’ll take a while for this to air. I’m going to just sit back and let you reflect a little bit on the annotation is project, the Annotate22 and some of the ones that have really either sparked something in you or that you’ve just seen spark things in others and just let you reflect for a little while on the progress that you’ve made and talk a little bit about that, from this year so far.

[00:16:01] Remi Kalir: Fantastic, and again, we’ll share links to the monthly blog post and I’ll just mention that the examples I’m going to share are all visual and so I’ll briefly talk through a few. My rationale behind sharing these with the hope that listeners visit these online resources. I wanted to begin the project on January 1st, with an example of annotation I think many people cherish, which is a book inscription. Even if people feel as though it’s taboo to write in a book that defaces the value of this material object, that even those folks who might cringe at writing in a book, will value a book that is inscribed with a personal dedication.

There’s a wonderful project out of the University of Virginia called Book Traces and it’s an open project that I linked to their website through my example. The very first entry in Annotate22, is a dedication that is dated June 5th, 1908 and it was also accompanied by a flower that was pressed inside the pages of the book. The dedication reads, “I give this June day to Ms. Gordon Bottomley, the inside of this book, Michael Field, June 5th, 1908.” Now, interestingly enough, Michael Field was a pseudonym, it was a pen name for two other individuals who wrote together and that was atherine Bradley, and her niece, Edith Cooper.

There’s a really fascinating literary history about who, “Michael Field,” was and in fact, these two women and who they were, and why they wrote together. I wanted to begin this entire project with an example of annotation that people may share, its a book inscription, but also with a bit of hidden history, around feminism, and identity, and why people may use pen names from an example that’s now over 100 years old, so there’s January 1st. Again, scrolling through some of this, some of the entries are particularly topical because of how they reference a particular date.

Listeners will know I take a pretty critical stance towards my work as an educator and as a professor and so I didn’t want these examples to be an asked case bereft of historical context. I think it’s important to note that on January 6th of this year, it was the one-year anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, and I felt it would be hard to not honor that in some way. Interestingly enough, there’s a very provocative, if not really quite troubling example of annotation from the insurrection. One of the insurrectionists, Jacob Chansley, who broke into the Senate chamber, wrote on a piece of paper that belonged to then Vice President Mike Pence, and that annotated document has now been used by the FBI in prosecuting his case.

I include a screenshot from a video that the New Yorker took during the insurrection of this individual writing on a piece of paper that belonged to then Vice President Pence. I just find these examples to be everywhere we look even in very challenging, and in some cases, still quite painful and lingering examples. I want daily entries to sometimes echo historical events, so there’s an example from January 6th. I also want to mention that we have- or I should say, I have a commitment to working with authors, and educators and community members who I’ve engaged with in previous context.

On this podcast Bonni, I’ve mentioned, for example, a project that I’ve done with other educators to read and discuss literature about critical literacies and equity-oriented learning and it’s called the Marginal Syllabus. We’ve been going on and off of that project with our partners over the years. Back in 2017, I had the honor of connecting with Debbie Reese, who’s considered to be a leading national expert in indigenous literacies, has written extensively about the representation of indigenous peoples, particularly in children’s literature. Debbie and I got to know one another back when we did this Marginal Syllabus project, because she was a partner author in that work, and I’ve always had a chance to connect with her on and off over the years.

I follow her on Twitter and I noticed sometime in January that she was tweeting out and commenting on a really problematic, if not, let’s just say overtly racist classroom lesson and worksheet that she had been shown by another colleague, and so she was able to get an image of this worksheet and she annotated it. She added, like you were referring to earlier, almost a label and that label said, “Not recommended.” I contacted Debbie and I got her permission and so the January 26th entry from this new project is, “Annotation is not recommended.” That’s what Debbie wrote, and I quote Debbie, “It provides a–” her analysis of this classroom worksheet.

It links back to her blog and this was to me, a really good example of trying to support more equity oriented literacy education, particularly in the context of K12 classrooms, showing in the case of Debbie’s work that this rejection of a very problematic worksheet was done through annotation, and really that technical ease by which she marked up the digital version of this worksheet, “Not recommended,” in really big red letters provided a really lovely opportunity for me to reestablish a conversation with her and then again get her permission to share this as a part of the project.

Those examples, and there’s a few in here where there are educators and scholars and folks that I’ve come across in the course of my work whose perspectives and whose annotations are also a featured part of the project. That’s just three from January. Again, this is happening every day. I should mention also that every month I’m changing the way in which I describe annotation, and so January was annotation is, as a way to provide some foundational definitions and examples. In February, we’ve shifted to annotation on. As one more example, and then I’ll stop rambling because I could just do this forever.

Some of the work in my preparation for this project is really deeply immersing myself in historical moments, digital exhibits, ways of trying to find really, I think interesting examples of how we see annotation appear. Of course with February is now black history month and trying to honor that in a way that feels authentic if I can say so, not superficial, and does so in a way that might provide a perspective or a point of entry to something new in some new way. I was really taken by the fact that the Woolworth’s lunch counter is now physically been moved into the Smithsonian, and that a digital version of this iconic moment in civil rights history is now a digital exhibit that is annotated.

On February 1st, that was the day in 1960 that Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Jibreel Khazan, were the, “Greensboro Four,” known as the Greensboro Four. They began their sit-in protests on February 1st, 1960. There’s a single photograph from that first day when they were leaving the Woolworth’s counter, they of course returned subsequently and there’s additional media documentation from their subsequent days of their sit-in. The Greensboro Four began that sit-in on February 1st, and on February 1st, now of 2022, I wanted to reference that specific date and coincidentally, the counter where they sat is not only now in the Smithsonian, but it’s actually digitally available online in a way that is annotated.

You can visit yourself right now that lunch counter, and it has all these interactive labels and all this multimedia that has been layered onto this text. If you’ve never seen that lunch counter before, if you’ve maybe not acquainted yourself with a really important moment in American history, you can do so by navigating the annotations of this exhibit. Again, in my entry from this February 1st, I provide a link to the Smithsonian magazine.

It’s writing about the exhibit, which is at the National Museum of American History as a part of the entire complex, and then the images that I include as a part of my project, you have an example of these digital annotations that have been added in the exhibit online to this actual material lunch counter. February began with annotation on the Woolworth lunch counter. I’ll leave that there. Now I’m really rambling about these examples, but I just find it so- for me, very meaningful and engaging to dig into, in some cases history in new ways that shows how common and accessible and also provocative annotation can be.

[00:26:10] Bonni Stachowiak: I would hardly call what you’ve been doing rambling. I would call it riveting in all seriousness, and I think sometimes for me, and I’m sure for some people listening, this can be exhilarating, but also intimidating. I’m going to invite you to shrink it down for us and remind us that it really is everywhere. Then I’m going to ask you to blow it up and talk about going big, so start it out with, if a person listening feels, gosh, how do I even- this feels big, this feels- how could I read this stuff? How could I engage or would I even want to, or how could I maybe take some of my values or the things that I know more about? I know which faucet is hot and which one is cool.

How can I start small and not just- because I think that’s one of the problems with when we care about things, but they feel really big, that it creates inaction. One more thing and then I’ll stop. [laughs] I’ll actually let you answer the question. I think the other thing is to allow ourselves, and it can be laziness on our part or just not being willing to get messy. No, I think- I look at you, Remi, and I go, my gosh, there’s no way I could ever. This isn’t a competition, first of all, but I think maybe we don’t see the messiness of just getting started to talk to someone like you who’s so deep in this that really sees it in so many aspects of your life. How do we start small with this, and not allow ourselves the excuse that it’s too hard or only for the experts?

[00:27:46] Remi Kalir: Sure. I think that actually messiness is an important entry point, and let me take that as an opportunity to talk about the example of cookbooks. If you’re looking for a place to get started and you want to embrace the idea that you are an annotator, start with a cookbook. I’ve been gifted from both my grandmother who is 94 years old and still alive and kicking, and also my mother, I’ve been gifted with some of their cookbooks and their handwritten adjustments to a recipe, their notes on even a slip of paper that’s then tucked into a cookbook.

I have of the gift of those cookbooks now in my kitchen, and so I would encourage folks who want to start small to find those everyday texts like a cookbook, where we feel it’s okay to write in a cookbook and maybe we want to, because we have to adjust this recipe a little bit. Too much sugar, a little bit more salt, or adjust the ratio of something. There are many contexts like that where we can find cookbooks or the back of a photograph– Before we all were carrying cell phones in our pockets and purses, perhaps we were cherishing printed out photographs where on the back we would write the date, or we would write a small family memory about what was photographed.

Again, maybe you have a shoe box in a closet or under your bed from generations back of cherished family memories and photographs, and maybe as a way of recalling the relevance of those moments … a nice little pencil or maybe a pen writing on the back of those photographs. For me, those are the really small entry points into recognizing annotation as an everyday practice. We are writing on texts, and we’re also writing on different kinds of media. The only other example I’ll very briefly mention it, if folks want a more digital example of this would be memes.

I think that many folks, particularly those who are going to listen to this podcast probably have some experience on social media, not only reading memes, but maybe also making them that we somehow feel, oh yes, I can go to some meme website and find that photograph that everybody is sharing and type in a few words to make an inside joke. That’s annotation. You’re taking a text, you’re adding a note to it, you’re re-mixing it in some way, you’re adding your particular stance, and you’re also doing so in a social context.

Memes are of course, a kind of social text, they have a social life. Those are for me, from cookbooks, to actual photographs that have been printed out, to maybe in a digital-space memes, those are all, I hope, pretty small ways and pretty everyday entry points to appreciating the ways in which we are annotators, in the various domains of our daily life.

[00:30:40] Bonni Stachowiak: All right, I promised we were going to go small, but we’re going big. What about those of us that have had a chance to play around a little bit? Maybe experimented with social annotation, familiar with the tools, et cetera? What are some of the things that other people are doing and you’d encourage, or that you would encourage us to do to go bigger with annotation?

[00:30:58] Remi Kalir: Well, I think the bigger thing here that I might point out, which I’m trying to do in the project is just to provide a trail. I know that sounds simple and also maybe a little ambiguous. One of the things that I’m doing, from a more technical perspective, is curating media on my blog, following principles of fair use and open access and all of those proper attribution practices to give people credit where credit is due of course, but curating the corpus of these examples, these entries, not only on my blog, but then also doing so on social media.

Having Twitter threads, where people can easily move their way back through. This is a kind of linear narrative and linear in that case has actually been quite helpful. Then from a slightly different technical perspective, I am using a social annotation technology that I’ve spoken about briefly before with you and I know folks are familiar with it. I know Bonni, you love to add your notes here and there. It’s called Hypothesis. It’s free. It’s open, but it provides an indelible mark that people can then meander through. If I annotate an online resource of Hypothesis, and then I maybe tag it, I’m able to then curate a trail, a pathway.

One of the big picture ideas for me here is that this is my project. This is my take on annotation. This is my little everyday celebration of the critical and the creative qualities of annotation, but what I’m also trying to do is leave a trail. I’m trying to leave a step-by-step process, so that other people, if they feel inclined to do so, can also make their processes visible to others. They can make their thinking, they can make their media creation, they can make all of these different points of engagement, be it on a blog or on social media, or on this annotation layer across the entire web, they can find their way.

I think that, that’s a really for me, important stance towards how we curate open knowledge, how we make our thinking and our work processes more accessible and available to other people. I do think from that really big picture perspective, to me this is an act of public pedagogy. This is me as somebody who cares deeply about the educational value of annotation, saying, “Hey, this is like Remi’s open webinar, Remi’s open workshop, Remi’s open example of annotation for this entire year. Come and hang out. These are all the different ways to play along. These are all the different ways to read along and hey, here’s how I’m doing that. You can get behind the scenes a little bit, if you really want to dig deeper in that bigger picture sense.”

[00:33:44] Bonni Stachowiak: Oh, this is so exciting. I have been following a little bit a couple of the stories that you shared were familiar, but one thing that I don’t think I’ve done, I think I haven’t subscribed on RSS because I like to be part of more of the ongoing conversation and that has felt a little bit sporadic for me. Thank you for today’s conversation because I feel like that’s the beauty of it. You’ve created a trail, and even if I missed it, this is not that late in the year that it couldn’t be revisited on our own time and to go back and engage. Like you said, that trail is there, and it’s wonderful.

[00:34:16] Remi Kalir: Yes, that’s right. I’m very aware that Twitter is fleeting. People’s attention to even blog posts can be, “Oh, I can’t … ” The idea is that I want to lay down a pathway that other people can choose to walk at any point in time and so they can revisit these trails at their own time, as driven by their own interest.

[00:34:36] Bonni Stachowiak: Well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. My recommendations somewhat tie back a little bit to the first story I told about the bathroom tub, because I mentioned the label maker. It’s kind of funny because I’ve been teaching this class on personal leadership and productivity for, gosh, almost 10 years now and one of the books we read is called, Getting Things Done by David Allen. I have a funny association because I realized, I don’t use one of the– He talks about tools that you need. One of the tools is pens, markers, stickies, those kinds of things that I think many of us use. [laughs] Remi pulls them up behind him.

Then, he also talks about rubber bands and I have an aversion toward rubber bands and so do many students that I get to walk alongside. Then, where we really part ways is I have a fondness for label makers and in general, they do not. This is not something that they have a fondness for. I’m actually going to go on a limb here and recommend label makers. We own multiple ones as a family but I have literally sitting on my desk two of them, because one of them does the skinnier tape that you might put on a manila folder or a faucet. Then the other one does the thicker address labels, that the paper is a little bit thinner on, but I’m going to recommend a label maker.

Then from there, I’m going to recommend two ways that you could make use of your label maker. Actually, I’m going to go on a little bit of a tangent. You could actually not even buy a label maker but print labels, so I’m going to recommend that you use a web service called Canva to make a bookplate. I’ve really tried to find pre-printed bookplates that met my specifications and none of them did. We have some books that people can check out from our Institute for Faculty Development, so I had some really fun times making those. Then I love loaning books out as well. A lot of the publishers will send me books.

I mostly do my reading digitally, so I love to get those out into the world where I can and pass that on. I have a little bit, just that they know it belongs to me and to get it back my way when they’re done with it. Using Canva to make a book plate is my second recommendation. Then my third recommendation, this is Mac specific, but I know that there would be a way to do this on Windows. I’m going to recommend an app called Cardhop. Again, other apps can do this, but to print individual address labels. I love the idea of reducing friction in our lives, and so I have this little Cardhop app.

I could go there and Remi if I had your address, I could just type in your name and do my little command P and it’s ready to go. Literally, two seconds later, there it is. Those of us that have done mail merge or like trying to do it out of a big printer, we’re living in a fun age today. It’s not easy to print out an address label. Again, whatever your app of choice is or whatever, if you do have a label printer, the fact that they can print out just one individual address label feels like a miracle to me, but then you can also create groups. Maybe you’ve got holiday cards or whatever it is that you might be sending things out. I just think that label makers, labels in general, bookplates, it’s a fun little playground to play in, and I highly recommend it.

[00:38:01] Remi Kalir: Oh Bonni, that’s fantastic. Well, I’ll also share briefly three recommendations. All of course are very much related to annotation. I’ll begin by mentioning a book that has really helped me for a whole variety of reasons, is Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s book, Data Feminism. It was published a few years ago now but it was recently made open access. It’s through MIT Press publisher of my book as well.

That’s actually where I first became familiar with Data Feminism because when Data Feminism was going through its review, the authors decided very intentionally to open this up for a open peer-review process, and received through a publishing platform called PubPub feedback from readers on the very first initial draft of the entire manuscript, and informed then the subsequent revisions which became the final version of Data Feminism and now, that’s entirely open as an open access publication.

I’ve always held the book, of course, in terms of its content, and its new perspective and it’s criticality in very high esteem. I’ve always appreciated the ways in which Cathy D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein have modelled public pedagogy and open scholarly stance through the various stages of the life of this book, which again now, any of you who are listening can find it right now and access entirely free in its open version. That’s my first recommendation. My second actually comes from the organization JSTOR which I think many folks in higher ed and academia, whatever role you may be in are probably familiar with JSTOR.

They have a new annotation initiative or an annotation project we might call it, where they are linking primary source scholarship to foundational documents in at least so far American history to make some of their resources more open and accessible to participate in some kind of open scholarly process, and do so through this kind of annotation of a primary source. They have two entries so far. One is the Declaration of Independence, and the other is Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The primary sources are then linked to JSTOR resources that readers can then also access openly.

I think that’s a fun new project that I’m very much intrigued by and will be continuing to follow. Then the third thing I’ll mention briefly is the National Monument Audit, which is an audit of monuments in America. It’s done by the Monument Lab. They have an amazing website that we can make sure that we include the link to, that folks can look at aspects of this report. You can also request copies of this audit, but of course, monuments are texts. They have authors. They very much reify particular narratives about whose histories perhaps are, or are not a part of particular dominant narratives, and monuments are of course very much contested in our current social and political moment.

In my opinion, for all kinds of good reason. This audit of the kinds of iconography that appear in the built environment that people walk by when they’re going through a park or a plaza, this to me is a really incredible resource to help think about the ways in which monuments shape daily narratives and how we might through other work that the Monument Lab is doing, reimagine the future of memorials and monuments and remembrance, particularly in public spaces. The National Monument Audit, I think is a really powerful text for folks to have a look at.

[00:41:43] Bonni Stachowiak: Every time I get a chance to [laughs] talk to you- this will be one of those delightful times where I go slowly through composing the show notes, because I’m going to have such a delight going down so many fun engaging and challenging rabbit trails. Thank you in advance for that, and thank you for coming back on the podcast and sharing about this. Hopefully you’ll keep coming back because I want to talk and see what happens between February 16th and beyond. This is such an exciting project. Thank you for all that you’re doing through your work.

[00:42:13] Remi Kalir: Bonni, thank you, and thank you for providing a platform for so many of us. I know that you’ve now– Is it 400, right? You’ve gone past 400. The legacy that you’ve established in so many different education circles, you’re providing a resource that is of course just invaluable. Thank you for letting me be one small part of this incredible endeavor. Thank you so much.

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[00:42:38] Bonni Stachowiak: Thank you once again to Remi Kalir for joining me for today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. It’s number 404. If you’d like to access the show notes, you can do so probably already on whatever you use to listen to the show on. On your phone podcast player, you can probably swipe one way up down, left, right, in order to access those show notes, or head on over to teachinginhighered.com/404.

If you’d like to not have to remember to get those show notes, they can come into your inbox as part of the Teaching in Higher Ed weekly update, and you’ll receive the most recent episode’s show notes along with some quotable words, other recommendations that don’t show up on the regular show. You can subscribe to the weekly update at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

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The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.