Might Hypothes.is also be included with this list? Though it could go a bit further toward packaging and making it more easily available to self-hosters.

Scalar magic

multi-scalar governance complex (Levinson et al.,<br> 2020; Tröhler, 2020).

multi-scalar governance complex

Hi folx-- let's get your Scalar pages going...!

Scalar helpful hints

Refers to 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift's famous--and oft taught--A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (1792).

It is indeed a classic example of "irony" in literature.

The next two stanzas cover the marginalia of school children, a familiar image to high school and college English students. This stanza covers less enthusiastic students, who seem to just copy down what their teachers say about certain passages.

This is the first of two specific marginalia that the speaker of the poem recalls in the poem, the later one encompassing the final two climactic stanzas.

These lines also establish the speaker as a thoughtful reader, pausing to reflect not only on the books he is reading, but their marginalia as well. But it should be noted that he himself does not write in the book.

Just about the time many of us read J.D. Sallinger's Catcher in the Rye.

For the eager to learn students described in this stanza, Collins uses an extended sports analogy for their marginalia. They are fans shouting support of the favorite teams/authors.

The analogy of course begs comparison between the relative audiences for the type of written works described in the poem and popular sports.

Here the removed interaction between the author and the reader/annotator is imagined metaphorically as a physical, somewhat brutal, one, the speaker reading such critiques as a physical threats.

Collins may be mocking marginalia here in the same way he mocks a certain kind of student's approach to poetry in "Introduction to Poetry":

But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope<br> and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose<br> to find out what it really means.

A lovely metaphor for memory: like a treasured piece of jewelry, one worn (as lockets often are) in memory of someone or something.

The poem climaxes with a description of a marginal note that the speaker remembers in a library book, and that he imagines was written by a beautiful girl. These final lines show the speaker imagining the note-writer leaving her message after becoming so enthralled with Holden Caulfield that she drops her sandwich on the book.

Both the original emotionally-wrought stain, and the speaker's emotional response to it, serve to demonstrate the power of reading, how deeply we can become engaged in the books we read. More broadly, marginalia is the perfect vehicle for that human relationship to literature.

William Blake took particular offense with Reynolds' Discourses on Art. The two had radically different views on the role of art, Blake believing that men were born with artistic knowledge while Reynolds arguing that such knowledge was only gained from experience.

Collins alludes to Blake's famously harsh annotations of Reynolds (see this article from the Andrew Graham-Dixon archive for more). On the title page of Discourses on Art, Blake wrote, “This Man was Hired to Depress Art.” Later he went further:

Having spent the vigour my Youth & Genius under the Oppression of Sr Joshua & his Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves Without Employment & as much as could possibly be Without Bread, The Reader must Expect to Read in all my Remarks on these Books Nothing but Indignation & Resentment. While Sr Joshua was rolling in Riches, Barry was Poor & Unemploy’d except by his own Energy; Mortimer was call’d a Madman, & only Portrait Painting applauded by the Rich & Great ... Fuseli, Indignant, almost hid himself. I am hid.

Before the 1440 invention of the printing press, books like the Gospel would have been painstakingly copied by hand.

Johannes Guttenberg, inventor of the press, is most famous for his definitive edition of the Bible--the copy below is at the NY Public library.

As the Lapham's Quarterly has blogged such marginalia ranged from the bizarre to the pornographic.

In this stanza, the poet includes a community of active readers in his ode to marginalia. These are active readers who engage the works under study with their own thoughts--just like the communities of hypothes.is! You are right now experiencing Marginalia 2.0!

It's true. This is a favorite theme of both high school and college English teachers. William Golding's Lord of the Flies would be a great book to note this theme in the margins.

The sidelines here a metaphor for the margin of the page and continue the sports analogy begun in the opening lines of the stanza.

It would be wonderful to be able to have pop up GIFs on this page when you scroll over a highlighted word. We should play around with that.

As in null?

Test annotation on the page header.

This is an annotation of a thing on a thing.

Woot!