Throughout the first half of the year, my friend and colleague Remi Kalir and I have been drafting a book about annotation for the MIT Essential Knowledge Series. In our view, annotation is one of those things that everybody does regularly but is ill-defined: it plays a central role in our interactions with each other and with technology, it is fundamental to various disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields, and i has remained a central human activity since long before print-culture of the 1600s. (Selfishly, my own interests in digital and civic literacies intersect with the writing and social practices at the heart of annotation and I wish a book about annotation broadly already existed before this one.)

Long story short, the entirety of our working manuscript is online and we are hoping you will participate in the slightly-meta process of annotating the Annotation draft. Using the PubPub open publishing platform, we encourage you to read, discuss, and review the claims we are making in this book. To be clear, this is not simply a navel-gazing activity. Alongside a set of blind-reviewers that will be providing feedback, Remi and I will be looking closely at the comments, critiques, and suggestions included in this annotation process in order to revise this book.

But here’s the thing: writing deadlines are a tricky thing! In order for us to finish our revisions in the fall, we are setting an official end date to this review period. This book will be taken offline for us to complete our revision on August 23. So if you want to offer feedback (or just get a sneak peek at the book before it hits the proverbial shelves in the future), you’ve got roughly two months to do so!