Audiated Annotation from the Middle Ages to the Open Web
Tanya Clement, Liz Fischer · Digital humanities quarterly · 2021
Current theories about the significance of annotations in literary studies are based primarily on assumptions developed in print culture about verbal texts. In these textual theories, the text is typically present, authorized, and centralized as the ideal text for an ideal reader, and to annotate is to add authorized comments in a sociotechnical system that includes publication, dissemination, and reception. To audiate is to imagine a song that's not playing. In music learning theory, audiation is based on the concept that the musician learns to play music by developing their own musical aptitude, her individual interpretation of a musical score based on her particular experience of the music. This short article introduces audiation as an alternate theoretical framing for articulating the significance of personal literary annotations. Comparing commentary on psalms in the Middle Ages to IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) web annotations, we use the concept of audiation to situate annotations within literary study in terms of a more capacious understanding of the individual's interpretation of text and of the reading experience as part of an unauthorized, distributed, and decentralized system. By bringing together theories and technologies of annotation with sound, we offer the concept of audiated annotations as a means to re-evaluate modes of access, discovery, and analysis of cultural objects in digital sound studies.